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EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 



ADDISON 



BY 



W. J. COURTHOPE 





/■: 



NEW YORT^ — 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS 

FRANKLIN SQUARE 

1884 



ENGLISH 'MEN OF LETTERS. 

Edited by John Morley. 



Johnson Leslie Stephen. 

Gibbon J. C. Morison. 

Scott R. H. Hutton. 

Shelley J. A. Symonds. 

Hume T. H. Huxley. 

Goldsmith William Black. 

Defoe William Minto. 

Burns J. C. Shairp. 

Spenser R. W. Church. 

Thackeray Anthony Trollope. 

Burke John Morley. 

Milton Mark Pattison. 

Hawthorne Henry James, Jr. 

SouTHEY Bt Dowden. 

Chaucer A. W. Ward. 

BuNYAN J. A. Froude. 

CowPER Goldwin Smith. 



Pope Leslie Stephen. 

Byron John Nichol. 

Locke Thomas Fowler. 

Wordsworth F. Myers. 

Dryden G. Saintsbury. 

Landok Sidney Colvin. 

De Quincey David Masson. 

Lamb Alfred Ainger. 

Bentley R. C. Jebb. 

Dickens A. W. Ward. 

Gray E. W. Gosse. 

Swift Leslie Stephen. 

Sterne H. D. Traill. 

Macaulay J. Cotter Morison. 

Fielding Austin Dobson. 

Sheridan Mrs. Oliphant. 

Addison W. J. Courthope. 



i2mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume. 



Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. 

Any of the above -works -will be sent by -mail, postage prepaid, to any part 
of the United States, on receipt of the price. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. PAGE 

The State of English Societt and Letters after 
THE Restoration 1 

CHAPTER II. 
Addison's Family and Education 21 

CHAPTER III. 
Addison on His Travels 38 

CHAPTER IV. 
His Employment in Affairs of Stato . . . . . . 53 

CHAPTER V. 
The "Tatler" and "Spectator" 78 

CHAPTER VI. 
"Cato" 110 

CHAPTER VII. 
Addison's Quarrel with Pope 125 

CHAPTER VIII. 
The Last Years op His Life 139 

CHAPTER IX. 
The Genius op Addison ; 153 



ADDISON. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE STATE OF ENGLISH SOCIETY AND LETTERS AFTER 
THE RESTORATION. 

Of the four English men of letters whose writings most 
fully embody the spirit of the eighteenth century, the one 
who provides the biographer with the scantiest materials 
is Addison. In his Journal to Stella^ his social verses, 
and his letters to his friends, we have a vivid picture of 
those relations with women and that protracted suffering 
which invest with such tragic interest the history of Swift. 
Pope, by the publication of his own correspondence, has 
enabled us, in a way that he never intended, to understand 
the strange moral twist which distorted a nature by no 
means devoid of noble instincts. Johnson was fortunate 
in the companionship of perhaps the best biographer who 
ever lived. But of the real life and character of Addison 
scarcely any contemporary record remains. The formal 
narrative prefixed to his works by Tickell is, by that writ- 
er's own admission, little more than a bibliography. Steele, 
who might have told us more than any man about his boy- 
hood and his manner of life in London, had become es- 
tranged from his old friend before his death. No writer 



2 ADDISON. [CHAP. 

has taken the trouble to preserve any account of the wit 
and wisdom tliat enlivened the " little senate " at Button's. 
His own letters are, as a rule, compositions as finished as 
his papers in the Spectator. Those features in his charac- 
ter which excite the greatest interest have been delineated 
by the hand of an enemy — an enemy who possessed an 
unrivalled power of satirical portrait-painting, and was re- 
strained by no regard for truth from creating in the pub- 
lic mind such impressions about others as might serve to 
heighten the favourable opinion of himself. 

This absence of dramatic incident in Addison's life 
would lead us naturally to conclude that he was deficient 
in the energy and passion which cause a powerful nature 
to leave a mark upon its age. Yet such a judgment would 
certainly be erroneous. Shy and reserved as he was, the 
unanimous verdict of his most illustrious contemporaries 
is decisive as to the respect and admiration which he ex- 
cited among them. The man who could exert so potent 
an influence over the mercurial Steele, who could fascinate 
the haughty and cynical intellect of Swift, whose conver- 
sation, by the admission of his satirist Pope, liad in it 
something more charming than that of any other man ; 
of whom it was said that he might have been chosen king 
if he wished it; such a man, though to the coarse percep- 
tion of Mandeville he might have seemed no more than 
" a parson in a tye-wig," can hardly have been deficient in 
force of character. 

Nor would it have been possible for a writer distin- 
guished by mere elegance and refinement to leave a last- 
ing impress on the literature and society of his country. 
In one generation after another, men representing oppos- 
ing elements of rank, class, interest, and taste, have agreed 
in acknowledging Addison's extraordinary merits. " WJio- 



I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 3 

ever wishes," says Johnson — at the end of a biography 
strongly coloured with the prepossessions of a semi-Jacob- 
ite Tory — "whoever wishes to attain an English style, fa- 
miliar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, 
must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." 
" Such a mark of national respect," says Macaulay, the 
best representative of middle-class opinion in the present 
century, speaking of the statue erected to Addison in West- 
minster Abbey, " was due to the unsullied statesman, to 
the accomplished scholar, to the master of pure English 
eloquence, to the consummate painter of life and manners. 
It was due, above all, to the great satirist who alone knew 
how to use ridicule without abusing it;, who, without in- 
flicting a wound, effected a great social reform, and who 
reconciled wit and virtue after a long and disastrous sepa- 
ration, during which wit had been led astray by profligacy, 
and virtue by fanaticism." 

This verdict of a great critic is accepted by an age to 
which the grounds of it are, perhaps, not very apparent. 
The author of any ideal creation — a poem, a drama, or a 
novel — has an imprescriptible property in the fame of his 
work. But to harmonise conflicting social elements, to 
bring order out of chaos in the sphere of criticism, to form 
right ways of thinking about questions of morals, taste, 
and breeding, are operations of which the credit, though 
it is certainly to be ascribed to particular individuals, is 
generally absorbed by society itself. Macaulay's eulogy is 
as just as it is eloquent, but the pages of the Spectator 
alone will hardly show the reader why Addison should be 
so highly praised for having reconciled wit with virtue. 
Nor, looking at him as a critic, will it appear a great 
achievement to have pointed out to English society the 
beauties of Paradise Lost, unless it be remembered that 
1* 



4 ADDISON. [chap. 

the taste of the preceding generation still influenced Addi- 
son's conteraporaries, and that in that generation Cowley 
was accounted a greater poet than Milton. 

To estimate Addison at his real value we inust regard 
him as the chief architect of Public Opinion in the eigh- 
teenth century. But here again we are met by an initial 
difficulty, because it has become almost a commonplace of 
contemporary criticism to represent the eighteenth century 
as a period of sheer destruction. It is tacitly assumed by 
a school of distinguished philosophical writers that we 
have arrived at a stage in the world's history in which it is 
possible to take a positive and scientific view of human 
affairs. As it is of course necessary that from such a 
system all belief in the supernatural shall be jealously ex- 
cluded, it has not seemed impossible to write the history 
of Thought itself in the eighteenth century. And in tra- 
cing the course of this supposed continuous stream it is nat- 
ural that all the great English writers of the period should 
be described as in one vyay or another helping to pull down, 
or vainly to strengthen, the theological barriers erected by 
centuries of bigotry against the irresistible tide of enlight- 
ened progress. 

It would be of course entirely out of place to discuss 
here the merits of this new school of history. Those wh® 
consider that, whatever glimpses we may obtain of the law 
and order of the universe, man is, as he always has been 
and always will be, a mystery to himself, will hardly allow 
that the operations of the human spirit can be traced in 
the dissecting-room. But it is, in any case, obvious that 
to treat the great imaginative writers of any age as if they 
were only mechanical agents in an evolution of thought is 
to do them grave injustice. Such writers are, above all 
things, creative. Their first aim is to " show the very age 



I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 5 

and body of the time his form and pressure." No work 
of the eighteenth century, composed in a consciously de- 
structive spirit, has taken its place among the acknowl- 
edged classics of the language. Even the Tale of a Tub 
is to be regarded as a satire upon the aberrations of theo- 
logians from right reason, not upon the principles of Chris- 
tianity itself. The Essay on Man has, no doubt, logically 
a tendency towards Deism, but nobody ever read the poem 
for the sake of its philosophy ; and it is well known that 
Pope was much alarmed when it was pointed out to him 
that his conclusions might be represented as incompatible 
with the doctrines of revealed religion. 

The truth indeed seems to be the exact converse of what 
is alleged by the scientific historians. So far from the 
eighteenth century in England being an age of destructive 
analysis, its energies were chiefly devoted to political, so- 
cial, and literary reconstruction. Whatever revolution in 
faith and manners the English nation had undergone had 
been the work of the two preceding centuries, and though 
the historic foundations of society remained untouched, 
the whole form of the superstructure had been profoundly 
modified. 

" So tenacious are we," said Burke, towards the close of the last 
century, " of our old ecclesiastical modes and fashions of institution 
that very little change has been made in them since the fourteenth or 
fifteenth centuries, adhering in this particular as in all else to our 
old settled maxim never entirely nor at once to depart from antiquity. 
We found these institutions on the whole favourable to morality and 
discipline, and we thought they were susceptible of amendment with- 
out altering the ground. We thought they were capable of receiving 
and meliorating, and, above all, of preserving the accessories of sci- 
ence and literature as the order of Providence should successively 
produce them. And after all, with this Gothic and monkish educa- 
tion (for such it is the groundwork), we may put in our claim to as 



6 ADDISON. [chap. 

ample and early a share in all the improvements in science, in arts, 
and in literature whicli have illuminated the modern world as any 
other nation in Europe. We think one main cause of tliis improve- 
ment was our not despising the patrimony of knowledge which was 
left us by our forefathers." 

All this is, in substahce, true of our political as well as 
our ecclesiastical institutions. And yet, when Burke wrote, 
the great feudal and mediaeval structure of England had 
been so transformed by the Wars of the Roses, the Refor- 
mation, the Rebellion, and the Revolution, that its ancient 
outlines were barely visible. In so far, therefore, as his 
words seem to iniply that the social evolution he describes 
was produced by an imperceptible and almost mechanical 
process of national instinct, the impression they tend to 
create is entirely erroneous. 

If we have been hitherto saved from such corruption as 
undermined the republics of Italy, from the religious wars 
that so long enfeebled and divided Germany, and from the 
Revolution that has severed modern France from her an- 
cient history, thanks for this are due partly, no doubt, to 
favouring conditions of nature and society, but quite as 
much to the genius of great individuals who prepared the 
mind of the nation for the gradual assimilation of new 
ideas. Thus Langland and Wycliffe and their numerous 
followers, long before the Reformation, had so familiarised 
the minds of the people with their ideas of the Christian 
religion that the Sovereign was able to assume the Head- 
ship of the Church without the shock of a social convul- 
sion. Fresh feelings and instincts grew up in the hearts 
of whole classes of the nation without at first producing 
any change in outward habits of life, and even without 
arousing a sense of their logical incongruity. These mixed 
ideas were constantly brought before the imagination in 



I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 1 

tlie works of the poets. Shakespeare abounds with pas- 
sages in which, side by side with the old feudal, monarchi- 
cal, catholic, and patriotic instincts of Englishmen, we find 
the sentiments of the Italian Renaissance, Spenser con- 
veys Puritan doctrines sometimes by the mouth of shep- 
herds, whose originals he had found in Theocritus and Vir- 
gil ; sometimes under allegorical forms derived from books 
of chivalry and the ceremonial of the Catholic Church. 
Milton, the most rigidly Calvinistic of all the English poets 
in his opinions, is also the most severely classical in his 
style. 

It was the task of Addison to carry on the reconciling 
traditions of our literature. It is his praise to have ac- 
complished his task under conditions far more difficult 
than any that his predecessors had experienced. What 
they had done was to give instinctive and characteristic 
expression to the floating ideas of the society about them ; 
what Addison and his contemporaries did was to found 
a public opinion by a conscious effort of reason and per- 
suasion. Before the Civil Wars there had been at least no. 
visible breach in the principle of Authority in Church and 
State. At the beginning of the eighteenth century con- 
stituted authority had been recently overthrown ; one king- 
had been beheaded, another had been expelled ; the Epis- 
copalian form of Church Government had been violently 
displaced in favour of the Presbyterian, and had been with 
almost equal violence restored. Whole classes of the pop- 
ulation had been drawn into opposing camps during the 
Civil War, and still stood confronting each other with' all 
the harsh antagonism of sentiment inherited from that 
conflict. Such a bare summary alone is sufficient to in- 
dicate the nature of the difficulties Addison had to en- 
counter in his efforts to harmonise public opinion ; but a 



8 ADDISON. [chap. 

more detailed examination of the state of society after the 
Restoration is required to place in Its full light the extraor- 
dinary merits of the success that he achieved. 

There was, to begin with, a vehement opposition be- 
tween town and country. In the country the old ideas of 
Feudalism, modified by circumstances, but vigorous and 
deep-rooted, still prevailed. True, the military system of 
land-tenure had disappeared with the Restoration, but it 
was not so with the relations of life, and the habits of 
thought and feeling which the system had created. The 
features of surviving Feudalism liave been inimitably pre- 
served for us in the character of Sir Roger de Coverley. 
Living in the patriarchal fashion, in the midst of tenants 
and retainers, who looked up to him as their chief, and 
for whose welfare and protection he considered himself 
responsible, the country gentleman valued above all things 
the principle of Loyalty. To the moneyed classes in the 
towns he was instinctively opposed; he regarded their 
interests, both social and commercial, as contrary to his 
own ; he looked with dislike and suspicion on the eco- 
nomical principles of government and conduct on which 
these classes naturally rely. Even the younger sons of 
county families had in Addison's day abandoned the 
custom, common enough in the feudal times, of seeking 
their fortune in trade. Many a Will Wimble now spent 
his whole life in the country, training dogs for his neigh- 
bours, fishing their streams, making whips for their young- 
heirs, and even garters for their wives and daughters.' 

The country gentlemen were confirmed in these ideas by 

the difiiculties of communication. During his visit to Sir 

Roger de Coverley the Si^ectator observed the extreme 

slowness with which fashions penetrated into the country ; 

' Spectator, No. 108. 



I.J LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 9 

and Le noticed, too, that party spirit was much more vio- 
lent there than in the towns. The learning of the clergy, 
many of whom resided with the country squires as chap- 
lains, was of course enlisted on the Tory side, and supplied 
it with arguments which the body of the party might per- 
haps have found it difficult to discover, or at least to ex- 
press, for themselves. For Tory tastes undoubtedly lay 
generally rather in the direction of sport than of books. 
Sir Roger seems to be as much above the average level of 
his class as Squire Western is certainly below it : perhaps 
the Tory fox-hunter of the Freeholder, though somewhat 
satirically painted, is a fair representative of the society 
which had its headquarters at the October Club, and whose 
favourite poet was Tom D'Urfey. 

The commercial and professional classes, from whom the 
Whigs derived their chief support, of course predominated 
in the towns, and their larger opportunities of associa- 
tion gave them an influence in affairs which compensated 
for their inferiority in numbers. They lacked, however, 
what the country party possessed, a generous ideal of life. 
Though many of them were connected with the Presby- 
terian system, their common sense made them revolt from 
its rigidity, while at the same time their economical prin- 
ciples failed to supply them with any standard that could 
satisfy the imagination. Sir Andrew Freeport excites in 
us less interest than any member of the Spectator's Club. 
There was not yet constituted among the upper middle 
classes that mixed conception of good feeling, good breed- 
ing, and good taste which we now attach to the name of 
"gentleman." 

Two main currents of opinion divided the country, to 
one of which a man was obliged to surrender himself if he 
wished to enjoy the pleasures of organised society. One 



10 ADDISON. [chap. 

of these was Puritanism, but this was undoubtedly the less 
popular, or at least the less fashionable. A protracted ex- 
perience of Roundhead tyranny under the Long Parliament 
had inclined the nation to believe that almost any form of 
Government was preferable to that of the Saints. The 
Puritan, no longer the mere sectarian, as in the days of 
Elizabeth and James I., somewhat ridiculous in the extrav- 
agance of his opinions, but respectable from the constancy 
with which he maintained them, had ruled over them as 
a taskmaster, and had forced them, as far as he could by 
military violence, to practise the asceticism to which monks 
and nuns had voluntarily submitted themselves. The most 
innocent as well as the most brutal diversions of the people 
were sacrificed to his spiritual pride. As Macaulay well 
says, he hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the 
bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectator. The 
tendency of his creed was, in fact, anti-social. Beauty in 
his eyes was a snare, and pleasure a sin ; the only mode of 
social intercourse which he approved was a sermon. 

On the other hand, the habits of the Court, which gave 
the tone to all polite society, were almost equally distaste- 
ful to the instincts of the people. It was inevitable that 
the inclinations of Charles II. should be violently opposed 
to every sentiment of the Puritans. While he was in the 
power of the Scots he had been forced into feigned com- 
pliance with Presbyterian rites ; the Puritans had put his 
father to death, and had condemned himself to many years 
of exile and hardship in Catholic countries. He had re- 
turned to his own land half French in his political and re- 
ligious sympathies, and entirely so in his literary tastes. 
To convert and to corrupt those of his subjects who imme- 
diately surrounded him was an easy matter. " All by the 
king's example lived and loved." Poets, paiaters,, and 



t.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 11 

actors were forward to promote principles viewed with 
favour by their sovereign and not at all disagreeable to 
themselves. An ingenious philosopher elevated Absolu- 
tism into an intellectual and moral system, the. consequence 
of which was to encourage the powerful in the indulgence 
of every selfish instinct. As the Puritans had oppressed 
the country with a system of inhuman religion and tran- 
scendental morality, so now, in order to get as far from 
Puritanism as possible, it seemed necessary for every one 
aspiring to be thought a gentleman to avow himself an 
atheist or a debauchee. 

The ideas of the man in the mode after the Restoration 
are excellently hit off in one of the fictitious letters in the 
Spectator : 

" I am now between fifty and sixty, and had the honour to be well 
with the first men of taste and gallantry in the joyous reign of 
Charles the Second. As for yourself, Mr. Spectator, you seem with 
the utmost arrogance to undermine the very fundamentals upon 
which we conducted ourselves. It is monstrous to set up for a man 
of wit and yet deny that honour in a woman is anything but peevish- 
ness, that inclination is not the best rule of life, or virtue and vice 
anything else but health and disease. We had no more to do but 
to put a lady in a good humour, and all we could wish followed of 
course. Then, again, your Tully and your discourses of another 
life are the very bane of mirth and good humour. Prythee, don't 
value thyself on thy reason at that exorbitant rate and the dignity 
of human nature ; take my word for it, a setting dog has as good 
reason as any man in England." ^ 

While opinions, which from different sides struck at the 
very roots of society, prevailed both in the fashionable and 
religious portions of the community, it was inevitable that 
Taste should be hopelessly corrupt. All the artistic and 
literary forms which the Court favoured were of the ro- 

1 Spectator, No. 168. 



12 ADDISON. [chap. 

mantic order, but it was romance from which beauty 
and vitality had utterly disappeared. Of the two great 
principles of ancient chivalry, Love and Honour, the last 
notes of which are heard in the lyrics of Lovelace and 
Montrose, one was now held to be non-existent, and the 
other was utterly perverted. The feudal spirit had sur- 
rounded woman with an atmosphere of mystical devotion, 
but in the reign of Charles IL the passion of love was sub- 
jected to the torturing treatment then known as " wit." 
Cowley and Waller seem to think that when a man is in 
love, the energy of his feelings is best shown by discover- 
ing resemblances between his mistress and those objects in 
nature to which she is apparently most unlike. 

The ideal of Woman, as she is represented in the Spec- 
tator, adding grace, charity, and refinement to domestic 
life, had still to be created. The king himself, the pre- 
sumed mirror of good taste, was notoriously under the 
control of his numerous mistresses ; and the highest notion 
of love which he could conceive was gallantry. French 
romances were therefore generally in vogue. All the casu- 
istry of love which had been elaborated by Mademoiselle 
de Scudery -vvas reproduced with improvements by Mrs. 
Aphra Behn. At the same time, as usually happens in 
diseased societies, there was a general longing to cultivate 
the simplicity of the Golden Age, and the consequence was 
that no person, even in the lower grades of society, who 
pretended to any reading, ever thought of making love 
in his own person. The proper tone of feeling was not 
acquired till he had invested himself with the pastoral at- 
tributes of Damon and Celadon, and had addressed his 
future wife as Amarantha or Phyllis. 

The tragedies of the period illustrate this general incli- 
nation to spurious romance. If ever there was a time 



I.] LETTEES AFTER THE RESTORATION. 13 

when the ideal of monarchy was degraded, and the instincts 
of chivah'ous action discouraged, it w^as in the reign of 
Charles 11. Absorbed as he was in the pursuit of pleasure, 
the king scarcely attempted to conceal his weariness when 
obliged to attend to affairs of State. He allowed the 
Dutch fleet to approach his capital and to burn his own 
ships of war on the Thames ; he sold Dunkirk to the 
French ; hardly any action in his life evinces any sense of 
patriotism or honour. And yet we have only to glance at 
Johnson's Life of Dryden to sec how all the tragedies of 
the time turn on the great characters, the great actions, 
the great sufferings of princes. The Elizabethan drama 
had exhibited man in every degree of life and with every 
variety of character; the playwright of the Restoration 
seldom descended below such themes as the conquest of 
Mexico or Granada, the fortunes of the Great Mogul, and 
the fate of Hannibal. This monotony of subject was 
doubtless in part the result of policy, for in pitying the 
fortunes of Montezuma the imagination of the spectator 
insensibly recalled those of Charles the Second. 

Everything in these tragedies is unreal, strained, and 
affected. In order to remove them as far as possible from 
the language of ordinary life they are written in rhyme, 
while the astonishment of the audience is raised with big 
swelling words, which vainly seek to hide the absence of 
genuine feeling. The heroes tear their passion to tatters 
because they think it heroic to do so ; their flights into 
the sublime generally drop into the ridiculous; instead 
of holding up the mirror to nature, their object is to de- 
part as far as possible from common sense. Nothing ex- 
hibits more characteristically the utterly artificial feeling, 
both of the dramatists and the spectators, than the habit 
which then prevailed of dismissing the audience after a 



14 ADDISON. [chap. 

tragic play with a witty epilogue. On one occasion, Nell 
Gwynne, in the character of St. Catherine, was, at the end 
of the play, left for dead upon the stage. Her body having 
to be removed, the actress suddenly started to her feet, ex- 
claiming, 

" Hold ! are you mad ? you damned confounded dog, 
I am to rise and speak the epilogue !" ^ 

By way of compensation, however, the writers of the 
period poured forth their real feelings without reserve in 
their comedies. So great, indeed, is the gulf that separates 
our own manners from theirs, that some critics have en- 
deavoured to defend the comic dramatists of the Resto- 
ration against the moralists on the ground that their rep- 
resentations of Nature are entirely devoid of reality. Charles 
Lamb, who loved all curiosities, and the Caroline comedi- 
ans among the number, says of them : 

" They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land. 
Take one of their characters, male or female (with few exceptions 
they are alike), and place it in a modern play, and my virtuous in- 
dignation shall rise against the profligate wi-etch as warmly as the 
Catos of the pit could desire, because in a modern play I am to judge 
of the right and the wrong. The standard of police is the measure 
oi political justice. The atmosphere will blight it; it cannot live 
here. It has got into a moral world, where it has no business, from 
which it must needs fall headlong — as dizzy and incapable of making 
a stand as a Swedenborgian bad spirit that has wandered unawares 
into his sphere of Good Men or Angels. But in its own world do 
we feel the creature is so very bad ? The Fainalls and Mirabels, the 
Dorimants and Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere do not offend 
my moral sense ; in fact, they do not appeal to it at all. They seem 
engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws or 
conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of 
Christendom into the land of — what shall I call it ? — of cuckoldry — 

1 Spectator, No. 341. 



I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 16 

the TJtopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty and the manners per- 
fect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which 
has no reference whatever to the world that is." 

This is a very happy description of the manner in which 
the plays of Etherege, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Congreve 
aflfect us to-day ; and it is no doubt superfluous to expend 
much moral indignation on works which have long since 
lost their power to charm : comedies in which the reader 
finds neither the horseplay of Aristophanes, nor the nature 
of Terence, nor the poetry of Shakespeare ; in which there 
is not a single character that arouses interest, or a situation 
that spontaneously provokes laughter ; in which the com- 
plications of plot are produced by the devices of fine gen- 
tlemen for making cuckolds of citizens, and the artifices of 
wives to dupe their husbands ; in which the profuse wit of 
the dialogue might excite admiration, if it were possible to 
feel the smallest interest in the occasion that produced it. 
But to argue that these plays never represented any state 
of existing society is a paradox which chooses to leave out 
of account the contemporary attack on the stage made by 
Jeremy Collier, the admissions of Dryden, and all those 
valuable glimpses into the manners of our ancestors which 
are afforded by the prologues of the period. 

It is sufficient to quote against Lamb the witty and se- 
vere criticism of Steele in the Spectator, upon Etherege's 
Man of the Mode : 

" It cannot be denied but that the negligence of everything which 
engages the attention of the sober and valuable part of mankind ap- 
pears very well drawn in this piece. But it is denied that it is nec- 
essary to the character of a fine gentleman that he should in that 
manner trample upon all order and decency. As for the character 
of Dorimant, it is more of a coxcomb than that of Fopling. He says 
of one of his companions that a good correspondence between them 



16 ADDISON. [chap. 

is their mutual interest. Speaking of that friend, he declares their 
being much together ' makes the women think the better of his un- 
derstanding, and judge more favourably of my reputation. It makes 
him pass upon some for a man of very good sense, and me upon oth- 
ers for a very civil person.' This whole celebrated piece is a perfect 
contradiction to good manners, good sense, and common honesty; 
and as there is nothing in it but what is built upon the ruin of virtue 
and innocence, according to the notion of virtue in this comedy, 
I take the shoemaker to be in reality the fine gentleman of the play ; 
for it seems he is an atheist, if we may depend upon his character as 
given by the orange-woman, who is herself far from being the lowest 
in the play. She says of a fine man who is Dorimant's companion, 
' there is not such another heathen in the town except the shoemaker.' 
His pretension to be the hero of the drama appears still moi'e in his 
own description of his way of living with his lady. ' There is,' says 
he, ' never a man in the town lives more like a gentleman with his 
wife than I do. I never mind her motions ; she never inquires into 
mine. We speak to one another civilly ; hate one another heartily ; 
and, because it is vulgar to lie and soak together, we have each of us 
our several settle-beds.' 

" That of 'soaking together' is as good as if Dorimant had spoken 
it himself; and I think, since he puts human nature in as ugly a 
form as the circumstances will bear, and is a staunch unbeliever, he 
is very much \frronged in having no part of the good fortune bestowed 
in the last act. To speak plain of this whole work, I think nothing 
but being lost to a sense of innocence and virtue can make any one 
see this comedy without observing more frequent occasion to move 
sorrow and indignation than mirth and laughter. At the same time 
I allow it to be nature, but it is nature in its utmost corruption and 
degeneracy." ' 

The truth is, that the stage after the Restoration reflects 
only too faithfully the manners and the sentiments of the 
only society which at that period could boast of anything 
like organisation. The press, which now enables public 
opinion to exercise so powerful a control over the manners 
of the times, had then scarcely an existence. No standard 
1 Spectator, No. 65. 



I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATIOX. 11 

of female honour restrained the license of wit and debauch- 
ery. If the clergy were shocked at the propagation of ideas 
so contrary to the whole spirit of Christianity, their natural 
impulse to reprove them was checked by the fear that an 
apparent condemnation of the practices of the Court might 
end in the triumph of their old enemies, the Puritans. All 
the elements of an old and decaying form of society that 
tended to atheism, cynicism, and dissolute living, exhibited 
themselves, therefore, in naked shamelessness on the stage. 
The audiences in the theatres were equally devoid of good 
manners and good taste ; they did not hesitate to interrupt 
the actors in the midst of a serious play, while they loudly 
applauded their obscene allusions. So gross was the char- 
acter of comic dialogue that women could not venture to 
appear at a comedy without masks, and under these cir- 
cumstances the theatre became the natural centre for assig- 
nations. In such an atmosphere women readily cast off all 
modesty and reserve ; indeed, the choicest indecencies of 
the times are to be found in the epilogues to the plays, 
which were always assigned to the female actors. 

It at first sight seems remarkable that a society inveter- 
ately corrupt should have contained in itself such powers 
of purification and vitality as to discard the literary gar- 
bage of the Restoration period in favour of the refined 
sobriety which characterises the writers of Queen Anne's 
reign. But, in fact, the spread of the infection was con- 
fined within certain well-marked limits. The Court moved 
in a sphere apart, and was altogether too light and frivolous 
to exert a decided moral influence on the great body of the 
nation. The country gentlemen, busied on their estates, 
came seldom to town ; the citizens, the lawyers, and the 
members of the other professions steadily avoided the the- 
atre, and regarded with equal contempt the moral and lit- 



18 ADDISON. [chap. 

erary excesses of the courtiers. Among this class, unrep- 
resented at present in the world of letters, except, perhaps, 
by antiquarians like Selden, the foundations of sound taste 
were being silently laid. The readers of the nation had 
hitherto been almost limited to the nobility. Books were 
generally published by subscription, and were dependent 
for their success on the favour with which they were re- 
ceived by the courtiers. But, after the subsidence of the 
Civil War, the nation began to make rapid strides in 
wealth and refinement, and the moneyed classes sought for 
intellectual amusement in their leisure hours. Authors by 
degrees found that they might look for readers beyond 
the select circle of their aristocratic patrons ; and the 
book-seller, who had hitherto calculated his profits merely 
by the commission he might obtain on the sale of books, 
soon perceived that they were becoming valuable as prop- 
erty. The reign of Charles II. is remarkable not only for 
the great increase in the number of the licensed printers in 
London, but for the appearance of the first of the race of 
modern publishers, Jacob Tonson. 

The portion of society whose tastes the publishers un- 
dertook to satisfy was chiefly interested in history, poetry, 
and criticism. It was this for which Dryden composed his 
Miscellany, this to which he addressed the admirable crit- 
ical essays which precede his Translations from the Latin 
Poets and his Versifications of Chaucer, and this which 
afterwards gave the main support to the Tatler and the 
Spectator. Ignorant of the writings of the great classical 
authors, as well as of the usages of polite society, these 
men were nevertheless robust and manly in their ideas, 
and were eager to form for themselves a correct standard 
of taste by reference to the best authorities. Though they 
turned with repugnance from the playhouse and from the 



I.] LETTERS AFTER THE RESTORATION. 19 

morals of the Court, they could not avoid being insensibly 
affected by the tone of grace and elegance which prevailed 
in Court circles. And in this respect, if in no other, our 
gratitude is due to the Caroline dramatists, who may justly 
claim to be the founders of the social prose style in Eng- 
lish literature. Before them English prose had been em- 
ployed, no doubt, with music and majesty by many writers ; 
but the style of these is scarcely representative ; they had 
used the language for their own elevated purposes, without, 
however, attempting to give it that balanced fineness and 
subtlety which makes it a fitting instrument for conveying 
the complex ideas of an advanced stage of society. Dry- 
den, Wycherley, and their followers, impelled by the taste 
of the Court to study the French language, brought to 
English composition a nicer standard of logic and a more 
choice selection of language, while the necessity of pleasing 
their audiences with brilliant dialogue made them careful 
to give their sentences that well -poised structure which 
Addison afterwards carried to perfection in the Spectator. 
By this brief sketch the reader may be enabled to judge 
of the distracted state of society, both in politics and taste, 
in the reign of Charles iT, On the one side, the Mo- 
narchical element in the Constitution was represented by 
the Court Party, flushed with the recent restoration ; re- 
taining the old ideas and principles of absolutism which 
had prevailed under James I., without being able to per- 
ceive their inapplicability to the existing nature of things ; 
feeding its imagination alternately on sentiments derived 
from the decayed spirit of chivalry, and on artistic repre- 
sentations of fashionable debauchery in its most open form 
— a party which, while it fortunately preserved the tradi- 
tions of wit, elegance,- and gaiety of style, seemed unaware 
that these qualities could be put to any other use than the 
2 



20 ADDISON. [chap. i. 

mitigation of an intolerable ennui. On the other side, the 
rising power of Democracy found its representatives in 
austere Republicans opposed to all institutions in Church 
and State that seemed to obstruct their own abstract prin- 
ciples of government ; gloomy fanatics, who, with an in- 
tense intellectual appreciation of eternal principles of re- 
ligion and morality, sought to sacrifice to their system the 
most permanent and even innocent instincts of human nat- 
ure. Between the two extreme parties was the unorgan- 
ised body of the nation, grouped round old customs and 
institutions, rapidly growing in wealth and numbers, con- 
scious of the rise in their midst of new social principles, 
but perplexed how to reconcile these with time-honoured 
methods of religious, political, and literary thought. To 
lay the foundations of sound opinion among the people at 
large; to prove that reconciliation was possible between 
principles hitherto exhibited only in mutual antagonism ; 
to show that under the English Constitution monarchy, 
aristocracy, and democracy might all be harmonised, that 
humanity was not absolutely incompatible with religion 
or morality with art, was the task of the statesmen, and 
still more of the men of letters, of the early part of the 
eighteenth century. 



CHAPTER II. 

Addison's family and education. 

Joseph Addison was born on the 1st of May, 1672. He 
was the eldest son of Lancelot Addison, at the time of 
his birth rector of Milston, near Amesbury, in Wiltshire, 
and afterwards Dean of Lichfield. His father was a man 
of character and accomplishments. Educated at Oxford, 
while that University was under the control of the famous 
Puritan Visitation, he made no secret of his contempt for 
principles to which he was forced to submit, or of his 
preferences for Monarchy and Episcopacy. His boldness 
was not agreeable to the University authorities, and being 
forced to leave Oxford, he maintained himself for a time 
near Petworth, in Sussex, by acting as chaplain or tutor 
in families attached to the Royalist cause. After the Res- 
toration he obtained the appointment of chaplain to the 
garrison of Dunkirk, and when that town was ceded to 
France in 1662, he was removed in a similar capacity to 
, Tangier. Here he remained eight years, but, venturing 
on a visit to England, his post was bestowed upon another, 
and he would have been left without resources had not one 
of his friends presented him with the living of Milston, 
valued at £120 a year. With the courage of his order he 
thereupon took a wife, Jane, daughter of Dr. Nathaniel 
Gulston, and sister of William Gulston, Bishop of Bristol, 



22 ADDISON. [chap. 

by ■whom he had six children, three sons and three daugh- 
ters, all born at Milston. In 1675 he was made a preben- 
dary of Salisbury Cathedral and Chaplain-in-Ordinary to 
the King; and in 1683 he was promoted to the Deanery 
of Lichfield, as a reward for liis services at Tangier, and 
out of consideration of losses which he had sustained by 
a fire at Milston. His literary reputation stood high, and 
it is said that he would have been made a bishop, if his 
old zeal for legitimacy had not prompted him to manifest 
in the Convocation of 1689 his hostility to the Revolution. 
He died in 1703. 

Lancelot was a writer at once voluminous and lively. 
In the latter part of his life he produced several treatises 
on theological subjects, the most popular of which was 
called An Introduction to the Sacrament. This book 
passed through many editions. The doctrine it contains 
leans rather to the Low Church side. But much the most 
characteristic of his writings were his works on Mahom- 
medanism and Judaism, the results of his studies during 
his residence in Barbary. These show not only consider- 
able industry and research and powers of shrewd observa- 
tion, but that genuine literary faculty which enables a 
writer to leave upon a vsubject of a general nature the im- 
pression of his own character. While there is nothing 
forced or exaggerated in his historical style, a vein of alle- 
gory runs through the narrative of the Revolutions of the 
Kingdoms of Fez nnd Morocco, which must have had a 
piquant flavour for the orthodox English reader of that day. 
Recollections of the Protectorate would have taken noth- 
ing of its vividness from the portrait of the Moorish priest 
who " began to grow into reputation with the people by 
reason of his high pretensions to piety and fervent zeal for 
their law, illustrated by a stubborn rigidity of conversation 



II.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 23 

and outward sanctity of life." When the Zeriffe, with am- 
bitious designs on the throne, sent his sons on a pilgrim- 
age to Mecca, the religious buffooneries practised by the 
young men must have recalled to the reader circumstances 
more recent and personal than those which the author was 
apparently describing. " Much was the reverence and rep- 
utation of holiness which they thereby acquired among 
the superstitious people, who could hardly be kept from 
kissing their garments and adoring them as saints, while 
they failed not in their parts, but acted as much devotion 
as high contemplative looks, deep sighs, tragical gestures, 
and other passionate interjections of holiness could ex- 
press. ' Allah, allah !' was their doleful note, their suste- 
nance the people's alms." And when these impostors had 
inveigled the King of Fez into a religious war, the descrip- 
tion of those who " mistrusted their own safety, and began, 
but too Jate, to repent their approving of an armed hypoc- 
risy," was not more applicable to the rulers of Barbary 
than to the people of England. " Puffed up with their 
successes, they forgot their obedience, and these saints 
denied the king the fifth part of their spoils. . . . By which 
it appeared that they took up arms, not out of love for 
their country and zeal for their religion, but out of desire 
of rule." There is, indeed, nothing in these utterances 
which need have prevented the writer from consistently 
promoting the Revolution of 1688 ; yet his principles seem 
to have carried him far in the opposite direction ; and it 
is interesting to remember that the assertor in Convocation 
of the doctrine of indefeasible hereditary right was the 
father of the author of the Whig Examiner and the Free- 
holder. However decidedly Joseph may have dissented 
from his father's political creed, we know that he enter- 
tained admiration and respect for his memory, and that 



24 ADDISON. [chap. 

death alone prevented him from completing the monument 
afterwards erected in Lancelot's honour in Lichfield Cathe- 
dral. 

Of Addison's mother nothing of importance is recorded. 
His second brother, Gulston, became Governor of Fort St. 
George, 4n the East Indies; and the third, Lancelot, fol- 
lowed in Joseph's footsteps so far as to obtain a Fellow- 
ship at Magdalen College, 0.\ford. His sisters, Jane and 
Anna, died young; but Dorothy was twice married, and 
Swift records in her honour that she was " a kind of wit, 
and very like her brother." We may readily believe that 
a writer so lively as Lancelot would have had clever chil- 
dren, but Steele was perhaps carried away by the zeal of 
friendship or the love of epigram when he said, in bis dedi- 
cation to the Drummer : " Mr. Dean Addison left behind 
him four children, each of whom, for excellent talents and 
singular perfections, was as much above the ordinary world 
as their brother Joseph was above them." But that Steele 
had a sincere admiration for the whole family is sufficient- 
ly shown by his using them as an example in one of his 
early Tatlers : 

"I remember among all my acquaintance but one man whom I 
have thought to live with his children with equanimity and a good 
grace. He had three sons and one daughter, whom he bred with all 
the care imaginable in a liberal and ingenuous way. I have often 
heard him say he had the weakness to love one much better than the 
other, but that he took as much pains to correct that as any other 
criminal passion that could arise in his mind. His method was to 
make it the only pretension in his children to his favour to be kind to 
each other, and he would tell them that he who was the best brother 
he would reckon the best son. This turned their thoughts into an 
emulation for the superiority in kind and tender affection towards 
each other. The boys behaved themselves very early with a manly 
friendship ; and their sister, instead of the gross familiarities and 



11.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 25 

impertinent freedoms in behaviour usual in other houses, was always 
t-reated by them with as much complaisance as any other young lady 
of their acquaintance. It was an unspeakable pleasure to visit or 
sit at a meal in that family. I have often seen the old man's heart 
flow at his eyes with joy upon occasions which would appear indiffer- 
ent to such as were strangers to the turn of his mind ; but a very 
slight accident, wherein he saw his children's good-will to one an- 
other, created in him the god- like pleasure of loving them because 
they loved each other. This great command of himself in hiding 
his first impulse to partiality at last improved to a steady justice 
towards them, and that which at first was but an expedient to cor- 
rect his weakness was afterwards the measure of his virtue." ' 

This, no doubt, is the set description of a moralist, and 
to an age in which the liberty of manners has grown into 
something like license it may savour of formalism and 
priggishness ; but when we remember that the writer was 
one of the most warm-hearted of men, and that the subject 
of his panegyric was himself, full of vivacity and impulse, 
it must be admitted that the picture which it gives us of 
the Addison family in the rectory of Milston is a particu- 
larly amiable one. 

Though the eighteenth century had little of that feeling 
for natural beauty which distinguishes our own, a man of 
Addison's imagination could hardly fail to be impressed by 
the character of the scenery in which his childhood was 
passed. No one who has travelled on a summer's day 
across Salisbury plain, with its vast canopy of sky and its 
open tracts of undulating dowuland, relieved by no shad- 
ows except such as are thrown by the passing cloud, the 
grazing sheep, and the great circle of Stonehenge, will for- 
get the delightful sense of refreshment and repose pro- 
duced by the descent into the valley of the Avon. The 
sounds of human life rising from the villages after the 
. > Toiler, No. 25. 



26 ADDISON. [chap. 

long solitude of the plain, the shade of the deep woods, 
the coolness of the river, like all streams rising in the 
chalk, clear and peaceful, are equally delicious to the sense 
and the imagination. It was, doubtless, the recollection 
of these scenes that inspired Addison in his paraphrase of 
the twenty-third Psalm : 

" The Lord my pasture shall prepare, 
And feed me with a shepherd's care. 

When in the sultry glebe I faint, 
Or on the thirsty mountain pant, 
To fertile vales and dewy meads 
My weary wandering steps he leads, 
Where peaceful rivers, soft and slow. 
Amid the verdant landscape flow." 

At Amesbury he was first sent to school, his master 
being one Nash ; and here, too, he probably met with the 
first recorded adventure of his life. It is said that having 
committed some fault, and being fearful of the conse- 
quences, he ran away from school, and, taking up his 
abode in a hollow tree, maintained himself as he could 
till he was discovered and bronght back to his parents. 
He was removed from Amesbury to Salisbury, and thence 
to the Grammar School at Lichfield, where he is said to 
have been the leader in a " barring out." From Lichfield 
he passed to the Charter House, then under the charge of 
Dr. Ellis, a man of taste and scholarship. The Charter 
House at that period w-as, after AVestminster, the best- 
known school in England, and here was laid the foundation 
of that sound classical taste which perfected the style of 
the essays in the SjJectator. 

Macaulay labours with much force and ingenuity to 
prove that Addison's classical acquirements were only 



II.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 27 

superficial, and, in liis usual epigrammatic manner, hazard's 
the opinion that " his knowledge of Greek, though doubt- 
less such as was, in his time, thought respectable at Oxford, 
was evidently less than that which many lads now carry 
away every year from Eton and Rugby." That Addison 
was not a scholar of the class of Bentley or Porson may 
be readily admitted. But many scattered allusions in his 
works prove that his acquaintance with the Greek poets 
of every period, if cursory, was wide and intelligent : he 
was sufficiently master of the language thoroughly to un- 
derstand the spirit of what he read ; he undertook while 
at Oxford a translation of Herodotus, and one of the pa- 
pers in the Spectator is a direct imitation of s. jeu d''esprit 
of Lucian's. The Eton or Rugby boy who, in these days, 
with a normal appetite for cricket and football, acquired 
an equal knowledge of Greek literature, would certainly be 
somewhat of a prodigy. 

No doubt, however, Addison's knowledge of the Latin 
poets was, as Macaulay infers, far more extensive and pro- 
found. It would have been strange had it been otherwise. 
The influence of the classical side of the Italian Renaissance 
was now at its height, and wherever those ideas became 
paramount Latin composition was held in at least as much 
esteem as poetry in the vernacular. Especially was this 
the case in England, where certain affinities of character 
and temperament made it easy for writers to adopt Roman 
habits of thought. Latin verse composition soon took firm 
root in the public schools and universities, so that clever 
bovs of the period were tolerably familiar with most of 
the minor Roman poets. Pope, in the Fourth Book of the 
Dunciad, vehemently attacked the tradition as confining 
the mind to the study of words rather than of things ; but 
he had himself had no experience of a public school, and 
2* 



28 ADDISON. [chap. 

only those who fail to appreciate the influence of Latin 
verse composition on the style of our own greatest orators, 
and of poets like Milton and Gray, will be inclined to un- 
dervalue it as an instrument of social and literary training. 
Proficiency in this art may at least be said to have laid 
the foundation of Addison's fortunes. Leaving the Char- 
ter House in 1687, at the early age of fifteen, he was en- 
tered at Queen's College, Oxford, and remained a member 
of that society for two years, when a copy of his Latin 
verses fell into the hands of Dr. Lancaster, then Fellow 
and afterwards Provost of the College. Struck with their 
excellence, Lancaster used his influence to obtain for him 
a demyship at Magdalen. The subject of this fortunate 
set of verses was " Liauguratio Regis Gulielmi," from which 
fact we may reasonably infer that even in his boyhood his 
mind had acquired a Whig bias. Whatever inclination he 
may have had in this direction would have been confirmed 
by the associations of his new college. The fluctuations 
of opinion in Magdalen had been frequent and extraordi- 
nary. Towards the close of Elizabeth's reign it was noto- 
rious for its Calvinism, but under the Chancellorship of 
Laud it appears to have adopted, with equal ardour, the 
cause of Arraiuianism, for it was among the colleges that 
offered the stoutest opposition to the Puritan visitors in 
1647-48. The despotic tendencies of James IL, however, 
again cooled its loyalty, and its spirited resistance to the 
king's order for the election of a Roman Catholic President 
had given a mortal blow to the Stuart dynasty. Hough 
was now President, but in consequence of the dispute with 
the king there had been no election of demies in 1688, so 
that twice the usual number was chosen in the following 
year, and the occasion was distinguished by the name of 
the " golden election." From Magdalen Addison proceed- 



II.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 29 

ed to bis master's degree in 1693 ; the College elected him 
probationary Fellow in 1697, and actual Fellow the year 
after. He retained his Fellowship till 1711. 

Of his tastes, habits, and friendships at Oxford there 
are few records. Among his acquaintance were Boulter, 
afterwards Archbishop of Dublin — whose memory is un- 
enviably perpetuated, in company with Ambrose Phillips, 
in Pope's Upistle to Arbuthnot, 

" Does not one table Bavius still admit, 
Still to one Bishop Phillips seem a wit?" — 

and possibly the famous Sacheverell.' He is said to have 
shown in the society of Magdalen some of the shyness that 
afterwards distinguished him ; he kept late hours, and read 
chiefly after dinner. The walk under the well-known elms 
by the Cherwell is still connected with his name. Though 
he probably acted as tutor in the college, the greater part 
of his quiet life at the University was doubtless occupied 
in study. A proof of his early maturity is seen in the 
fact that, in his nineteenth year, a young man of birth 
and fortune, Mr. Riishout, who was being educated at 
Magdalen, was placed under his charge. 

His reputation as a scholar and a man of taste soon ex- 
tended itself to the world of letters in London. In 1693, 
being then in his twenty-second year, he wrote his Account 
of the Oreateat English Poets ; and about the same time 
he addressed a short copy of verses to Dryden, compli- 

' A note in the edition of Johnson's Lives of the Poets, published 
in 1801, states, on the authority of a "Lady in Wiltshire," who de- 
rived her information from a Mr. Stephens, a Fellow of Magdalen 
and a contemporary of Addison's, that the Henry Sacheverell to 
whom Addison dedicated his Account of the Greatest Enylish Poets 
was not the well-known divine, but a personal friend of Addison's, 
who died young, having written a History of the Isle of Man. 



30 ADDISON. [chap. 

meriting him on the enduring vigour of his poetical facul- 
ty, as shown in his translations of Virgil and other Latin 
poets, some of which had recently appeared in Tonson's 
Miscellany. The old poet appears to have been highly 
gratified, and to have welcomed the advances thus made 
to him, for he returned Addison's compliment by bestow- 
ing high and not unmerited praise on the translation of 
the Fourth Book of the Georgics, which the latter soon 
after undertook, and by printing, as a preface to his own 
translation, a discourse written by Addison on the Georgics, 
as well as arguments to most of the books of the jEneid. 

Through Dryden, no doubt, he became acquainted with 
Jacob Tonson. The father of English publishing had for 
some time been a well-known figure in the literary world. 
He had purchased the copyright of Paradise Lost ; he had 
associated himself with Dryden in publishing before the 
Revolution two volumes of Miscellanies ; encouraged by 
the success which these obtained, he put the poet, in 1693, 
on some translations of Juvenal and Persius, and two new 
volumes of Miscellanies; while in 1697 he urged him to 
undertake a translation of the whole of the works of Vir- 
gil. Observing how strongly the public taste set towards 
the great classical Avriters, he was anxious to employ men 
of ability in the work of turning them into English ; and 
it appears from existing correspondence that he engaged 
Addison, while the latter was at Oxford, to superintend 
a translation of Herodotus. He also suggested a transla- 
tion of Ovid. Addison undertook to procure coadjutors 
for the work of translating the Greek historian. He him- 
self actually translated the books called Polymnia and 
Urania, but for some unexplained reason the work was 
never published. For Ovid he seems, on the whole, to 
have had less inclination. At Tonson's instance he trans- 



n.] FAMILY AXD EDUCATION. 31 

lated the Second Book of the Metamorphoses, which was 
first printed in the volume of Miscellanies that appeared 
in 1697; but he wrote to the publisher that "Ovid had 
so many silly stories with his good ones that he was more 
tedious to translate than a better poet would be." His 
study of Ovid, however, was of the greatest use in devel- 
oping his critical faculty ; the excesses and want of judg- 
ment in that poet forced him to reflect, and his observa- 
tions on the style of his author anticipate his excellent re- 
marks on the difference between True and False Wit in 
the sixty-second number of the Sj^ectator. 

Whoever, indeed, compares these notes with the Essay 
on the Georgics, and with the opinions expressed in the 
Account of the English Poets, will be convinced that the 
foundations of his critical method were laid at this period 
(1697). In the Essay on the Georgics he seems to be 
timid in the presence of Virgil's superiority ; his Account 
of the English Poets, besides being impregnated with the 
principles of taste prevalent after the Restoration, shows 
deficient powers of perception and appreciation. The 
name of Shakespeare is not mentioned in it, Dryden and 
Congreve alone being selected to represent the drama. 
Chaucer is described as " a merry bard," whose humour 
has become obsolete through time and change ; while 
the rich pictorial fancy of the Faery Queen is thus de- 
scribed : 

" Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage, 
In ancient tales amused a barbarous age— 
An age that yet uncultivate and rude, 
Where'er the poet's fancy led pursued, 
Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods. 
To dens of dragons and enchanted woods. 
But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, 
Can charm an understanding age no more ; 



32 ADDISON. [chap. 

The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, 
While the dull moral lies too plain below." 

According to Pope — always a suspicious witness where 
Addison is concerned — lie had not read Spenser when he 
wrote this criticism on him/ 

Milton, as a legitimate successor of the classics, is of 
course appreciated, but not at all after the elaborate fash- 
ion of the Spectator ; to Dryden. the most distinguished 
poet of the day, deserved compliments are paid, but their 
value is lessened by the exaggerated opinion which the 
writer entertains of Cowley, who is described as a " mighty 
genius," and is praised for the inexhaustible riches of his 
imagination. Throughout the poem, in fact, we observe 
a remarkable confusion of various veins of thought; an 
unjust depreciation of the Gothic grandeur of the older 
English poets ; a just admiration for the Greek and Ro- 
man authors ; a sense of the necessity of good sense and 
regularity in writings composed for an " understanding 
age ;" and at the same time a lingering taste for the 
forced invention and far-fetched conceits that mark the 
decay of the spirit of mediaeval chivalry. 

With the judgments expressed in this performance it 
is instructive to compare such criticisms on Shakespeare 
as we find in No. 42 of the Spectator, the papers on 
"Chevy Chase" (73, 74), and particularly the following 
passage : 

"As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit 
in the resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances, 
there is another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance 
of ideas and partly in the resemblance of words, which, for distinc- 
tion's sake, I sliall call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which 
abounds in Cowley more than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. 

' Spence's Anecdotes, p. 50. 



II.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 33 

Waller has Iikewi.=;e a groat deal of it. Mr. Pryden is very sparing 
in it. Milton has a genius much above it. Speiiser is in the same 
class with Milton. The Italians even in their epic poetry are full of 
it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon the ancient poets, 
has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we look after mixed wit 
among the Greeks, we shall find it nowhere but in the epigramma- 
tists. There are, indeed, some strokes of it in the little poem as- 
cribed to Musa3ns, which by that, as well as many other marks, be- 
trays itself to be a modern composition. If we look into the Latin 
writers we find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or Catul- 
lus ; very little in Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and scarce 
anything else in Martial." 

The stepping-stone from the immaturity of the early 
criticisms in the Accoicnt of the Greatest English Poets to 
the finished case of the Spectator is to be found in the 
notes to the translation of Ovid.' 

The time came when he was obliged to form a decision 
affecting the entire course of liis life. Tonson, who had 
a wide acquaintance, no doubt introduced him to Congrcve 
and the leading men of letters in London, and through 
them he was presented to Sonicrs and Montague. Those 
ministers perhaps persuaded' him, as a point of etiquette, 
to write, in 1695, his Address to King William, a poem 
composed in a vein of orthodox hyperbole, all of which 
must have been completely thrown away on that most 
unpoetical of monarchs. Yet in spite of those seductions 
Addison lingered at Oxford. To retain his Fellowship it 
was necessary for him to take orders. Had he done so, 
there can be no doubt that his literary skill and his value 
as a political partizan would have opened for him a road 
to the highest preferment. At that time the clergy were 

' Compare the Notes on the Metamorphoses, Fab. v. (Tickell's edi- 
tion, vol. vi. p. 183), where the substance of the above passage is 
found in embryo. 



34 ADDISON. [chap. 

far from thinking it unbecoming to their cloth to fight in 
the political arena or to take part in journalism. Swift 
would have been advanced to a bishopric, as a reward for 
his political services, if it had not been for the prejudice 
entertained towards him by Queen Anne ; Boulter, rector 
of St. Saviour's, Southwark, having made himself conspic- 
uous by editing a paper called the Freethinker, was raised 
to the Primacy of Ireland ; Hoadley, the notorious Bishop 
of Bangor, edited the London Journal ; the honours that 
were awarded to two men of such second-rate intellectual 
capacity would hardly have been denied to Addison. He 
was inclined in this direction by the example and advice 
of his father, who was noW Dean of Lichfield, and who 
was urgent on his son to rid himself of the pecuniary em- 
barrassments in which he was involved by embracing the 
Church as a profession. A few years before he had him- 
self seemed to look upon the Church as his future sphere. 
In his Account of the Greatest English Poets he says : 

" I leave the arts of poetry and verse 
To them that practise them with more success. 
Of greater truths I'll now propose to tell, 
And so at once, dear friend and muse, farewell." 

Had he followed up his intention we might have known 
the name of Addison as that of an artful controversial- 
ist, and perhaps as a famous writer of sermons ; but we 
should, in all probability, have never heard of the Spec- 
tator. 

Fortunately for English letters, other influences pre- 
vailed to give a different direction to his fortunes. It is 
true that Tickell, Addison's earliest biographer, states that 
his determination not to take orders was the result of his 
own habitual self-distrust, and of a fear of the responsibil- 
ities which the clerical ofiace would involve. But Steele, 



II.] FAMILY AND EDUCATION. 35 

who was better acquainted with his friend's private his- 
tory, on reading Tickell's Memoir addressed a letter to 
Congreve on the s-ubject, in which he says : 

"These, you know very well, were not the reasons which made 
Mr. Addison turn his thoughts to the civil world ; and, as you were 
the instrumerft of his becoming acquainted with Lord Halifax, I 
doubt not but you remember the warm instances that noble lord 
made to the head of the College not to insist upon Mr. Addison's 
going into orders. His arguments were founded upon the general 
pravity and corruption of men of business, who wanted libei'al edu- 
cation. And I remember, as if I had read the letter yesterday, that 
my lord ended with a compliment that, however he might be repre- 
sented as a friend to the Church, he never would do it any other in- 
jury than keeping Mr. Addison out of it." 

No doubt the real motive of the interest in Addison 
shown by Lord Halifax, at that time known as Charles 
Montague, was an anxiety which he shared with all the 
leading statesmen of the period, and of which more will 
be said presently, to secure for his party the services of 
the ablest writers. Finding his protege as yet hardly quali- 
fied to transact affairs of State, he joined with Lord Som- 
ers, who had also fixed his eyes on Addison, in soliciting 
for him from the Crown, in 1699, a pension of £300 a 
year, which might enable him .to supplement his literary 
accomplishments with the practical experience of travel. 
Addison naturally embraced the offer. He looked forward 
to studying the political institutions of foreign countries, 
to seeing the spots of which he had read in his favourite 
classical authors, and to meeting the most famous men of 
letters on the Continent. 

It is characteristic both of his own tastes and of his age 
that he seems to have thought his best passport to intel- 
lectual society abroad would be his Latin poems. His 



36 ADDISON. [chap. 

verses on the Peace of Rysiokk, written in 1697 and dedi- 
cated to Montague, had already procured him great repu- 
tation, and had been praised by Edmund Smith — a high 
authority — as "the best Latin poem since the ^neid.'''' 
This gave him the opportunity of collecting his various 
compositions of the same kind, and in 1699 he published 
from the Sheldonian Press a second volume of the Musce 
Anglicance — the first having appeared in 1691 — containing 
poems by various Oxford scholars. Among the contrib- 
utors were Hannes, one of the many scholarly physicians 
of the period ; J. Philips, the author of the Sjylendid Shil- 
ling ; and Alsop, a prominent antagonist of Bentley, whose 
Horatian humour is celebrated by Pope in the Dunciad.^ 

But the most interesting of the names in the volume is 
that of the once celebrated Edmond, commonly called 
" Rag," Smith, author of the Ode on the Death of Dr. Do- 
cock, who seems to have been among Addison's intimate 
acquaintance, and deserves to be recollected in connection 
with him on account of a certain similarity in their genius 
and the extraordinary difference in their fortunes. " Rag " 
was a man of fine accomplishments and graceful humour, 
but, like other scholars of the same class, indolent and 
licentious. In spite of great indulgence extended to him 
by the authorities of Christ Church, he was expelled from 
the University in consequence of his irregularities. His 
friends stood by him, and, through the interest of Addi- 
son, a proposal was made to him to undertake a history of 
the Revolution, which, however, from political scruples he 
felt himself obliged to decline. Like Addison, he wrote a 
tragedy modelled on classical lines ; but, as it had no po- 
litical significance, it only pleased the critics, without, like 
" Cato," interesting the public. Like Addison, too, he had 
' Dunciad, Book iv. 224. 



II.J FAMILY AND EDUCATION. SI 

an opportunity of profiting by the patronage of Halifax, 
but laziness or whim prevented him from keeping an ap- 
pointment which the latter had made with him, and caused 
him to miss a place worth £300 a year. Addison, by his 
own exertions, rose to posts of honour and profit, and to- 
wards the close of his life became Secretary of State, 
Smith envied his advancement, and, ignoring the fact that 
his own failure was entirely due to himself, murmured at 
fortune for leaving him in poverty. Yet he estimated his 
wants at £600 a year, and died of indulgence when he can 
scarcely have been more than forty years of age. 

Addison's compositions in the Musce Anglicance are 
eight in number. All of them are distinguished by the 
ease and flow of the versification, but they are generally 
wanting in originality. The best of them is the PygmcBO- 
Gerano-Machia, which is also interesting as showing traces 
of that rich vein of humour which Addison worked out in 
the Tatler and SjJectator. The mock-heroic style in prose 
and verse was sedulously cultivated in England through- 
out the eighteenth century. Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and 
Fielding, developed it in various forms ; but Addison's 
Latin poem is perhaps the first composition in which the 
fine fancy and invention afterwards shown in the Hape of 
the Lock and Gulllver^s Travels conspicuously displayed 
itself. 

A literary success of this kind at that epoch gave a 
writer a wider reputation than he could gain by composi- 
tions in his own language. Armed, therefore, with copies 
of the Musce Anglicance for presentation to scholars, and 
with Halifax's recommendatory letters to men of political 
distinction, Addison started for the Continent. 



CHAPTER III. 

ADDISON ON HIS TRAVELS. 

Travelling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
involved an amount of thought and precaution which 
would have seemed inconvenient to the tourist accustomed 
to abandon himself to the authority of guide-boots, cou- 
riers, and railway companies. By ardent spirits like Rod- 
erick Random it was regarded as the sphere of enterprise 
and fortune, and not without reason, in days when advent- 
ures were to be met with on almost every road in the coun- 
try, and in the streets and inns of the towns. The graver 
portion of society, on the other hand, considered it as part 
of the regular course of education through which every 
young man of position ought to pass before entering into 
active life. French was the universally recognised lan- 
guage of diplomacy. French manners and conversation 
were considered to be the best school for politeness, while 
Italy was held in the highest respect by the northern na- 
tions as the source of revived art and letters. Some of the 
most distinguished Englishmen of the time looked, it is 
true, with little favour on this fashionable training. " Lord 
dowper," says Spence, on the information of Dr. Cony- 
beare, " on his death-bed ordered that his son should never 
travel (it is by the absolute desire of the Queen that he 



CHAP. III.] HIS TRAVELS. 39 

does). He ordered this from a good deal of observation 
on its effects ; he had found that there was little to be 
hoped, and much to be feared, from travelling. Atwell, 
who is the j'oung lord's tutor abroad, gives but a very dis- 
couraging account of it, too, in his letters, and seems to 
think that people are sent out too young, and are too 
hasty to find any great good from it." 

On some of the stronger and more enthusiastic minds 
the chief effect of the grand tour was to produce a violent 
hatred of all foreign manners. Dennis, the critic, for in- 
stance, who, after leaving Cambridge, spent some time on 
the Continent, returned with a confirmed dislike to the 
French, and ostentatiously displayed in his writings how 
much he held " dragoons and wooden shoes in scorn ;" 
and it is amusing to find Addison at a later date making 
his Tory fox-hunter declare this anti-Gallican temper to 
be the main fruits of foreign travel. 

But, in general, what was intended to be a school for 
manners and political instruction proved rather a source 
of unsettlement and dissipation ; and the vigorous and 
glowing lines in which Pope makes the tutor describe to 
Dullness the doings of the "young ^neas" abroad, may 
be taken as a faithful picture of the travelled pupil of the 
period : 

" Intrepid then o'er seas and land he flew ; 
Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too. 
There all thy gifts and graces we display, 
Thou, only thou, directing all our way ! 
To where the Seine, obsequious as she runs, 
Pours at great Bourbon's feet her silken sons ; 
Or Tyber, now no longer Roman, rolls, 
Vain of Italian arts, Italian souls : 
To happy convents bosomed deep in vines. 
Where slumber abbots purple as their wines : 



40 ADDISON. [chap. 

To isles of fragrance, lily-silvered vales, 
Diffusing languor in the panting gales : 
To lands of singing or of dancing slaves, 
Love-whispering woods, and lute-resounding waves. 
But chief her shrine where naked Venus keeps, 
And Cupids ride the lion of the deeps ; 
Where, eased of fleets, the Adriatic main 
Wafts the smooth eunuch and enamoured swain. 
Led by my hand, he sauntered Europe round, 
And gathered every vice on Christian ground ; 
Saw every court, heard every king declare 
His royal sense of operas or the fair ; 
The stews and palace equally explored, 
Intrigued with glory, and with spirit whored ; 
Tried all ho7-s-d^ceuvres, all liqueurs defined. 
Judicious drank, and greatly daring dined ; 
Dropped the dull lumber of the Latin store, 
Spoiled his own language, and acquired no more ; 
All classic learning lost on classic ground; 
And last turned air, the echo of a sound." 

It is needless to say that Addison's experiences of 
travel were of a very different kind. He left England in 
his twenty-eighth year, with a mind well equipped from a 
study of the best authors, and with the intention of quali- 
fying himself for political employment at home, after fa- 
miliarising himself with the languages and manners of 
foreign countries. His sojourn abroad extended over four 
years, and his experience was more than usually varied and 
comprehensive. Crossing from Dover to Calais, some time 
in the summer of 1699, he spent nearly eighteen months in 
France making himself master of the language. In De- 
cember, 1700, he embarked at Marseilles for a tour in It- 
aly, and visited in succession the following places : Monaco, 
Genoa, Pavia, Milan, Brescia, Verona, Padua, Venice, Fer- 
rara, Ravenna, Rimini, S. Marino, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia, 



iii.j HIS TRAVELS. 41 

Ancona, Loreto, Rome (where, as it was his intention to re- 
turn, he only visited St. Peter's and the Pantheon), Naples, 
Capri, whence he came back to Rome by sea, the various 
towns in the neighbourhood of Rome, Siena, Leghorn, Pisa,- 
Lucca, Florence, Bologna, Modena, Parma, and Turin. 
Thus, in the course of this journey, which lasted exactly a 
twelvemonth, he twice crossed the Apennines, and made 
acquaintance with all the more important cities in the 
northern part of the Peninsula. In December, I'TOl, he 
passed over Mont Cenis to Geneva, proceeding then by 
Fribourg, Berne, Soleure, Zurich, St. Gall, Linden, Insbruck, 
Hall, to Vienna, where he arrived in the autumn of 1702. 
After making a brief stay in the Austrian capital he turned 
his face homewards, and having visited the Protestant 
cities of Germany, and made a rather longer stay in Ham- 
burg than in any other, he reached Holland in the spring 
of 1703, and remained in that country till his return to 
England, some time in the autumn of the same year. 

During his journey he made notes for his Remarks on 
Itahj, which he published immediately on his return home, 
and he amused himself, while crossing Mont Cenis, with 
composing his Letter to Lord Halifax, which contains, 
perhaps, the best verses he ever wrote. Though the 
ground over which he passed was well trodden, and though 
he possessed none of the special knowledge which gives 
value to the observations of travellers like Arthur Young, 
yet his remarks on the people and places he saw are the 
product of an original mind, and his illustrations of his 
route from the Latin poets are remarkably happy and 
graceful. It is interesting, also, to observe how many of 
the thoughts and suggestions which occurred to him on 
the road are afterwards worked up into papers for the 
Spectator. 



42 ADDISON. [cHiP. 

When Addison landed in France, in 1699, the power of 
Louis XIV., so long the determined enemy of the English 
Revolution of 1688, had passed its climax. The Peace 
of Rysvvick, by which the hopes of the Jacobites were 
finally demolished, was two years old. The king, disap- 
pointed in his dreams of boundless military glory, had 
fallen into a fit of devotion, and Addison, arriving from 
England with a very imperfect knowledge of the language, 
was astonished to find the whole of French literature sat- 
urated with the royal taste. " As for the state of learn- 
ing," says he, in a letter to Montague, dated August, 1699, 
"there is no book comes out at present that has not some- 
thing in it of an air of devotion. Dacier has bin forced 
to prove his Plato a very good Christian before he vent- 
ures upon his translation, and has so far comply'd with y® 
tast of the age that his whole book is overrun with texts 
of Scripture, and y® notion of pra3-existence, supposed to 
be stolen from two verses of y® prophets. Nay, y® hu- 
mour is grown so universal that it is got among y® poets, 
who are every day publishing Lives of Saints and Legends 
in Rhime." 

Finding, perhaps, that the conversation at the capital 
was not very congenial to his taste, he seems to have hur- 
ried on to Blois, a town then noted for the purity with 
which its inhabitants spoke the French language, and 
where he had determined to make his temporary abode. 
His only record of his first impressions of Paris is a casual 
criticism of " y® King's Statue that is lately set up in the 
Place Vendome." He visited, however, both Versailles and 
Fontainebleau, and the preference which he gives to the 
latter (in a letter to Congreve) is interesting, as anticipat- 
ing that taste for natural as opposed to artificial beauty 
which he afterwards expressed in the Spectator. 



III.] HIS TRAVELS. 43 

" I don't believe, as good a poet as you are, that you can make finer 
Lanskips than those about tho King's houses, or with all yo"" descrip- 
tions build a more magnificent palace than Versailles. I am, how- 
ever, so singular as to prefer Fontainebleau to the rest. It is situ- 
ated among rocks and woods that give you a fine variety of Savage 
prospects. The King has Humoured the Genius of the place, and 
only made of so much art as is necessary to Help and regulate Nat- 
ure, without reforming her too much. The Cascades seem to break 
through the Clefts and Cracks of Rocks that are covered over with 
Moss, and look as if they were piled upon one another by Accident. 
There is an artificial wildness in the Meadows, Walks, and Canals, 
and y^ Garden, instead of a Wall, is Fenced on the Lower End by a 
Natural Mound of Rock-work that strikes the eye very agreeably. 
For my part, I think there is something more charming in these rude 
heaps of Stone than in so many Statues, and wou'd as soon see a 
River winding through Woods and Meadows as when it is tossed up 
in such a variety of figures at Versailles." ' 

Here and there, too, his correspondence exhibits traces 
of that delicate vein of ridicule in which he is without a 
rival, as in the following inimitable description of Le Brun's 
paintings at Versailles : 

" The painter has represented his most Xtian Majesty under y* fig- 
ure of Jupiter throwing thunderbolts all about the ceiling, and strik- 
ing terror into y^ Danube and Rhine, that lie astonished and blasted 
a little above the Cornice." 

Of his life at Blois a very slight sketch has been pre- 
served by the Abbe Philippeaux, one of the many gossip- 
ping informants from whom Spence collected his anec- 
dotes : 

" Mr. Addison stayed above a year at Blois. He would rise as 

* Compare Spectator, 414. " I do not know whether I am singular 
in my opinion, but for my part I would rather look upon a tree in all 
its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, rather than when 
it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure ; and cannot 
but fancy that an orchard in flower looks infinitely more delightful 
-*han all the little labyrinths of the finished parterre." 
3 



44 ADDISON. [chap. 

early as between two and three in summer, and lie abed till between 
eleven and twelve in the depth of winter. He was untalkative while 
here, and often thoughtful ; sometimes so lost in thought that I have 
come into his room and have stayed five minutes there before he 
has known anything of it. He had his masters generally at supper 
with him, kept very little company beside, and had no amour whilst 
here that I know of, and I think I should have known it if he had 
had any." 

The following characteristic letter to a gentleman of 
Blois, with whom he seems to have had an altercation, is 
interesting as showing the mixture of coolness and dignity, 
the "blood and judgment well commingled" which Hamlet 
praised in Horatio, and which are conspicuous in all Addi- 
son's actions as well as in his writings : 

" Sir, — I am always as slow in making an Enemy as a Friend, and 
am therefore very ready to come to an Accommodation with you ; but 
as for any satisfaction, I don't think it is due on either side when y^ 
Affront is mutual. You know very well that according to y* opinion 
of y^ world a man would as soon be called a Knave as a Fool, and I 
believe most people w* be rather thought to want Legs than Brains. 
But I suppose whatever we said in y« heat of discourse is not y^ real 
opinion we have of each other, since otherwise you would have scorned 
to subscribe yourself as I do at present, S"", y' very, etc. 

A. Mons' L'Espagnol, 
Blois, 10>"- 1699." 

The length of Addison's sojourn at Blois seems to have 
been partly caused by the difficulty he experienced, owing 
to the defectiveness of his memory, in mastering the lan- 
guage. Finding himself at last able to converse easily, he 
returned to Paris some time in the autumn of 1700, in 
order to see a little of polite society there before starting 
on his travels in Italy. He found the best company in 
the capital among the men of letters, and he makes especial 
mention of Malebranche, whom he describes as solicitous 



III.] HIS TRAVELS. 45 

about the adequate rendering of his works into English; 
and of Boileau, who, having now survived almost all his 
literary friends, seems, in his conversation with Addison, 
to have been even more than usually splenetic in his judg- 
ments on his contemporaries. The old poet and critic 
was, however, propitiated with the present of the Miisce 
Anglicanoe ; and, according to Tickell, said " that he did 
not question there were excellent compositions in the na- 
tive language of a country that possessed the Roman genius 
in so eminent a degree." 

In general, Addison's remarks on the French character 
are not complimentary. He found the vanity of the people 
so elated by the elevation of the Duke of Anjou to the 
throne of Spain that they were insupportable, and he felt 
no reluctance to quit France for Italy. His observations 
on the national manners, as seen at Blois, are character- 
istic : 

" Truly, by what I have yet seen, they are the Happiest nation in 
the world. 'Tis not in the pow'r of Want or Slavery to make 'em 
miserable. There is nothing to be met with in the Country but Mirth 
and Poverty. Ev'ry one sings, laughs, and starves. Their Conver- 
sation is generally Agreeable ; for if they have any Wit or Sense they 
are sure to show it. They never mend upon a Second meeting, but 
use all the freedom and familiarity at first Sight that a long Intimacy 
or Abundance of wine can scarce draw from an Englishman. Their 
Women are perfect Mistresses in this Art of showing themselves to 
the best Advantage. They are always gay and sprightly, and set off 
y« worst faces in Europe with y^ best airs. Ev'ry one knows how to 
give herself as charming a look and posture as S"" Godfrey Kneller c^ 
draw her in." ' 

He embarked from Marseilles for Genoa in December, 
IVOO, having as his companion Edward Wortley Montague, 

' Letter to the Right Honourable Charles Montague, Esq., Blois, 
lO""- 1699. 



46 ADDISON. [chap. 

whom Pope satirises under the various names of Shylock, 
Worldly, and Avidien. It is unnecessary to follow him step 
by step in bis travels, but the reader of his Letter to Lord 
Halifax may still enjoy the delight and enthusiasm to which 
he gives utterance on finding himself among the scenes de- 
scribed in his favourite authors : 

" Poetic fields encompass me around, 
And still I seem to tread on classic ground ; 
For here the Muse so oft her harp has strung, 
That not a mountain I'ears its head unsung ; 
Renowned in verse each shady thicket grows, 
And every stream in heavenly numbers flows." ' 

The phrase " classic ground," which has become proverbial, 
is first used in these verses, and, as will have been observed. 
Pope repeats it with evident reference to the above passage 
in his satire on the travels of the " young ^neas." Addi- 
son seems to have carried the Latin poets with him, and his 
quotations from them are abundant and apposite. When 
he is driven into the harbour at Monaco, he remembers 
Lucan's description of its safety and shelter ; as he passes 
under Monte Circeo, he feels that Virgil's description of 
JEneas's voyage by the same spot can never be siiflSciently 
admired ; he recalls, as he crosses the Apennines, the fine 
lines of Claudian recording the march of Honorius from 
Ravenna to Rome ; and he delights to think that at the 
falls of the Velino he can still see the " angry goddess " of 
the ^neid (Alecto) " thus sinking, as it were, in a tempest, 
and plunging herself into Ilell " amidst such a scene of 
horror and confusion. 

His enthusiastic appreciation of the classics, which caused 
him in judging any work of art to look, in the first place, 
for regularity of design and simplicity of effect, shows it- 
' Letter from Italy to Lord Halifax. 



III.J HIS TRAVELS. 47 

self characteristically in his remarks on the Lombard and 
German styles of architecture in Italy. Of Milan Cathe- 
dral he speaks without much admiration, but he was im- 
pressed with the wonders of the Certosa near Pavia. " I 
saw," says he, " between Pavia and Milan the convent 
of the Carthusians, which is very spacious and beautiful. 
Their church is very fine and curiously adorned, but of a 
Gothic structure." His most interesting criticism, how- 
ever, is that on the Duomo at Siena : 

" When a man sees the prodigious pains and expense that our 
forefathers have been at in these barbarous buildings, one cannot 
but fancy to himself what miracles of architecture they would have 
left us had they only been instructed in the right way ; for, when 
the devotion of those ages was much warmer than that of the pres- 
ent, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal of the 
priests, there was so much money consumed on these Gothic cathe- 
drals as would have finished a greater variety of noble buildings 
than have been raised either before or since that time. One would 
wonder to see the vast labour that has been laid out on this single 
cathedral. The very spouts are loaden with ornaments, the Avindows 
are formed like so many scenes of perspective, with a multitude of 
little pillars retiring behind one another, the great columns are finely 
engraven with fruits and foliage, that run twisting about them from 
the very top to the bottom ; the whole body of the church is cheq- 
uered with different lays of black and white marble, the pavement 
curiously cut out in designs and Scripture stories, and the front cov- 
ered with such a variety of figures, and overrun with so many mazes 
and little labyrinths of sculpture, that nothing in the world can 
make a prettier show to those who prefer false beauties and affected 
ornaments to a noble and majestic simplicity." ' 

Addison had not reached that large liberality in criti- 
cism afterwards attained by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who, 
while insisting that in all art there was but one true style, 
nevertheless allowed very high merit to what he called the 
' Addison's Wo7'ks (Tickell's edition), vol. v. p. 301. 



48 ADDISON. [chap. 

characteristic styles. Sir Joshua would never have fallen 
into the error of imputing affectation to such simple and 
honest workmen as the early architects of Northern Italy. 
The effects of Addison's classical training are also very 
visible in his descriptions of natural scenery. There is in 
these nothing of that craving melancholy produced by a 
sense of the infinity of nature which came into vogue after 
the French Revolution ; no projection of the feelings of 
the spectator into the external scene on which he gazes ; 
nor, on the other hand, is there any attempt to rival the 
art of the painter by presenting a landscape in words in- 
stead of in colours. He looks on nature with the same 
clear sight as the Greek and Roman writers, and in de- 
scribing a scene he selects those particulars in it which he 
thinks best adapted to arouse pleasurable images in the 
mind of the reader. Take, for instance, the following ex- 
cellent description of his passage over the Apennines : 

" The fatigue of our crossing the Apennines, and of our whole 
journey from Loretto to Rome, was very agreeably relieved by the 
variety of scenes we passed through. For, not to mention the rude 
prospect of rocks rising one above another, of the deep gutters worn 
in the sides of them by torrents of rain and snow-water, or the long 
channels of sand winding about their bottoms that are sometimes 
filled with so many rivers, we saw in six days' travelling the sev' 
eral seasons of the year in their beauty and perfection. We were 
sometimes shivering on the top of a bleak mountain, and a little 
while afterwards basking in a warm valley, covered with violets and 
almond -trees in blossom, the bees already swarming over them, 
though but in the month of February. Sometimes our road led us 
through groves of olives, or by gardens of oranges, or into several 
hollow apartments among the rocks and mountains, that look like 
so many natural greenhouses, as being always shaded with a great 
variety of trees and shrubs that never lose their verdure." ' 

' Addison's Works (Tickell's edition), vol. v. p. 213. 



I 



III.] HIB TRAVELS. 1^^^^^""' ^^ 

Though his thoughts during his travels were largely 
occupied with objects chiefly interesting to his taste and 
imagination, and though he busied himself with such com- 
positions as the Epistle from Italy, the Dialogue on Med- 
als, and the first four acts of Cato, he did not forget that 
his experience was intended to qualify him for taking part 
in the affairs of State. And when he reached Geneva, in 
December, 1701, the door to a political career seemed to 
be on the point of opening. He there learned, as Tickell 
informs us, that he had been selected to attend the army 
under Prince Eugene as secretary from the King. He 
accordingly waited in the city for oflScial confirmation of 
this intelligence ; but his hopes were doomed to disap- 
pointment. William HI. died in March, 1702; Halifax, 
on whom Addison's prospects chiefly depended, was struck 
off the Privy Council by Queen Anne ; and the travelling 
pension ceased with the life of the sovereign who had 
granted it. Henceforth he had to trust to his own re- 
sources ; and though the loss of his pension does not seem 
to have compelled him at once to turn homewards, as he 
continued on his route to Vienna, yet an incident that 
occurred towards the close of his travels shows that he 
was prepared to eke out his income by undertaking work 
that would have been naturally irksome to him. 

At Rotterdam, on his return towards England, he met 
with Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, for whom, as has been 
said, he had already done some work as a translator. 
Tonson was one of the founders of the Kit-Kat Club, and 
in that capacity was brought into frequent and intimate 
connection with the Whig magnates of the day. Among 
these was the Duke of Somerset, who, through his wife, 
then high in Queen Anne's favour, exercised considerable 
influence on the course of affairs. The Duke required a 



50 ADDISON. . [cuAP. 

tutor for his son, Lord Hertford, and Tonson recommend- 
ed Addison. On tlie Duke's approval of the recommen- 
dation, the bookseller seems to have communicated with 
Addison, who expressed himself, in general terms, as will- 
ing to undertake the charge of Lord Hertford, but desired 
to know more particulars about his engagement. These 
were furnished by the Duke in a letter to Tonson, and 
they are certainly a very curious illustration of the man- 
ners of the period. " I ought," says his Grace, " to enter 
into that affair more freely and more plainly, and tell yon 
what I propose, and what I hope he will comply with — 
viz., I desire he may be more on the account of a com- 
panion in my son's travels than as a governor, and that 
as such I shall account him : my meaning is, that neither 
lodging, travelling, nor diet shall cost him sixpence, and 
over and above that my son shall present him at the 
year's end with a hundred guineas, as long as he is pleased 
to continue in that service to my son, by his personal at- 
tendance and advice, in what he finds necessary during his 
time of travelling." 

To this not very tempting proposal Addison replied : 
"I have lately received one or two advantageous offers of 
y® same nature, but as I should be very ambitious of ex- 
ecuting any of your Grace's commands, so I can't think 
of taking y® like employ from any other hands. As for 
y® recompense that is proposed to me, I must take the 
liberty to assure your Grace that I should not see my ac- 
count in it, but in y^ hope that I have to recommend my- 
self to your Grace's favour and approbation," This reply 
proved highly offensive to the Duke, who seems to have 
considered his own offer a magnificent one. " Your letter 
of the 16th," he writes to Tonson, on June 22, 1703, 
" with one from Mr. Addison, came safe to me. You say 



iir.] HIS TRAVELS. 51 

he will give me an account of his readiness of complying 
with my proposal. I Avill set down his own words, which 
are thus: *As for the recompense that is proposed to me, 
I must confess I can by no means see my account in it,' 
etc. All the other parts of his letter are compliments to 
me, which he thought he was bound in good breeding to 
write, and as such I have taken them, and no otherwise ; 
and now I leave you to judge how ready he is to comply 
with my proposal. Therefore, I have wrote by this first 
post to prevent his coming to England on my account, and 
have told him plainly that I must look for another, which 
I cannot be long a-finding." 

Addison's principal biographer. Miss Aikin, expresses 
great contempt for the niggardliness of the Duke, and says 
that, "Addison must often have congratulated himself in 
the sequel on that exertion of proper spirit by which he 
had escaped from wasting, in an attendance little better 
than servile, three precious years, which he found means 
of employing so much more to his own honour and satis- 
faction, and to the advantage of the public." Mean as the 
Duke's offer was, it is nevertheless plain that Addison re- 
ally intended to accept it, and, this being so, he can scarce- 
ly be congratulated on having on this occasion displayed 
his usual tact and felicity. Two courses appear to have 
been open to him. He might either have simply declined 
the offer " as not finding his account in it," or he might 
have accepted it in view of the future advantages which he 
hoped to derive from the Duke's " favour and approba- 
tion ;" in which case he should have said nothing about 
finding the " recompense " proposed insufficient. By the 
course that he took he contrived to miss an appointment 
which he seems to have made up his mind to accept, and 
3* 



52 ADDISON. [chap. hi. 

lie oSended an influential statesman wliose favour lie was 
anxious to secure. 

To his pecuniary embarrassments was soon added do- 
mestic loss. At Amsterdam he received news of his fa- 
ther's death, and it may be supposed that the private 
business in which he must have been involved in conse- 
quence of this event brought him to England, where he 
arrive^ some time in the autumn of 1703. 



CHAPTER IV. 

HI3 EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 

Addison's fortunes were now at their lowest ebb. The 
party from which he had looked for preferment was out 
of office ; his chief political patron was in particular dis- 
credit at Court ; his means were so reduced that he was 
forced to adopt a style of living not much more splendid 
than that of the poorest inhabitants of Grub Street. Yet 
within three years of his return to England he was pro- 
moted to be an Under-Secretary of State — a post from 
which he mounted to one position of honour after another 
till his final retirement from political life. That he was 
able to take advantage of the opportunity that offered it- 
self was owing to his own genius and capacity ; the op- 
portunity was the fruit of circumstances which had pro- 
duced an entire revolution in the position of English men 
of letters. 

Through the greater part of Charles II.'s reign the pro- 
fession of literature was miserably degraded. It is true 
that the King himself, a man of wit and taste, was not 
slow in his appreciation of art ; but he was by his charac- 
ter insensible to what was serious or elevated, and the 
poetry of gallantry, which he preferred, was quite within 
reach of the courtiers by whom he was surrounded. Roch- 
ester, Buckingham, Sedley, and Dorset are among the 



54 ADDISOX. [chap. 

principal poetical names of the period ; all of them being 
well qualified to shine in verse, the chief requirements of 
which were a certain grace of manner, an air of fashiona- 
ble breeding, and a complete disregard of the laws of de- 
cency. Besides these " songs by persons of quality," the 
principal entertainment was provided by the drama. But 
the stage, seldom a lucrative profession, was then crowd- 
ed with writers whose fertile, if not very lofty, invention 
tept down the price of plays. Otway, the most success- 
ful dramatist of his time, died in a state of indigence, and 
as some say, almost of starvation, while playwrights of less 
ability, if the house was ill-attended on the third night, 
when the poet received all tlie profits of the performance, 
were forced, as Oldham says, " to starve or live in tatters 
all the year.'" 

Periodical literature, in the shape of journals and maga- 
zines, had as yet no existence ; nor could the satirical poet 
or the pamphleteer find his remuneration in controver- 
sial writing, the' strong reaction against Puritanism having 
raised the monarchy to a position in which it was practi- 
cally secure against the assaults of all its enemies. The 
author of the most brilliant satire of the period, who had 
used all the powers of a rich imagination to discredit the 
Puritan and Republican cause, was paid with nothing more 
solid than admiration, and died neglected and in want. 

" The wretch, at summing up his misspent days, 
Found nothing left but poverty and praise ! 
Of all his gains by verse he could not save 
Enough to purchase flannel and a grave ! 
Reduced to want he in due time fell sick, 
Was fain to die, and be interred on tick ; 

' Oldham's Satire Dissuading from Poetry. 



IT.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 56 

And well might bless the fever that was sent 
I) To rid him hence, and his worse fate prevent." * 

In the latter part of this reign, however, a new com- 
bination of circumstances produced a great change in 
the character of English literature and in the position of 
its professors. The struggle of Parties recommenced. 
Wearied with the intolerable rule of the Saints, the nation 
had been at first glad to leave its newly-restored King to 
bis pleasures, but, as the memories of the Commonwealth 
became fainter, the people watched with a growing feel- 
ing of disgust the selfishness and extravagance of the 
Court, while the scandalous sale of Dunkirk and the sight 
of the Dutch fleet on the Thames made them think of 
the patriotic energies which Cromwell had succeeded in 
arousing. At the same time the thinly-disguised inclina- 
tion of the King to Popery, and the avowed opinions of 
his brother, raised a general feeling of alarm for the 
Protestant liberties of the nation. On the other hand, 
the Puritans, taught moderation by adversity,- exhibited 
the really religious side of their character, and attracted 
towards themselves a considerable portion of the aristoc- 
racy, as well as of the commercial and professional class- 
es in the metropolis — a combination of interests which 
helped to form the nucleus of the Whig party. The 
clergy and the landed proprietors, who had been the chief 
sufferers from Parliamentary rule, naturally adhered to 
the Court, and were nicknamed by their opponents Tories. 
Violent party conflicts ensued, marked by such incidents 
as the Test Act, the Exclusion Bill, the intrigues of Mon- 
mouth, the Popish Plot, and the trial and acquittal of 
Shaftesbury on the charge of high treason. 

Finding his position no longer so easy as at his restora- 
' Qldharo's Satire Dismadinff from Poetry. 



56 ADDISON. [chap. 

fion, Charles naturally bethought him of calling literature 
to his assistance. The stage, being completely under his 
control, seemed the readiest instrument for his purpose; 
the order went forth, and an astonishing display of mo- 
narchical fervour in all the chief dramatists of the time 
— Otway, Dryden, Lee, and Crowne — was the result. 
Shadwell, who was himself inclined to the Whig interest, 
laments the change : 

" The stage, like old Rump pulpits, is become 
The scene of News, a furious Party's drum." 

But tlie political influence of the drama and the audience 
to which it appealed being necessarily limited, the King 
sought for more powerful literary artillery, and he found 
it in the serviceable genius of Dryden, whose satirical and 
controversial poems date from this period. The wide 
popularity of Absalom and Achitophel, written against 
Monmouth and Shaftesbury ; of The Medal, satirising the 
acquittal of Shaftesbury ; of The Hind and Panther, com- 
posed to advance the Romanising projects of James II. ; 
points to the vast influence exercised by literature in the 
party struggle. Nevertheless, in spite of all that Dryden 
had done for the Royal cause, in spite of the fact that 
he himself had more than once appealed to the poet for 
assistance, the ingratitude or levity of Charles was so in- 
veterate that he let the poet's services go almost unre- 
quited. Dryden, it is true, held the posts of Laureate 
and Royal Historiographer, but his salary was always in 
arrears, and the letter which he addressed to Rochester, 
First Lord of the Treasury, asking for six months' pay- 
ment of what was due to him, tells its own story. 

James II. cared nothing for literature, and was probably 
too dull of apprehension to understand the incalculable 



IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 57 

service that Dryden had rendered to his cause. He 
showed his appreciation of the Poet-Laureate's genius by 
deducting £100 from the salary which his brother had 
promised him, and by cutting off from the emoluments of 
the office the time-honoured butt of canary ! 

Under William III. the complexion of affairs again al- 
tered. The Court, in the old sense of the word, ceased to 
be a paramount influence in literature. William III. de- 
rived his authority from Parliament ; he knew that he 
must support it mainly by his sword and his statesman- 
ship. A stranger to England, its manners and its lan- 
guage, he showed little disposition to encourage letters. 
Pope, indeed, maliciously suggests that he had the bad 
taste to admire the poetry of Blackmore, whom he 
knighted ; but, as a matter of fact, the honour was con- 
ferred on the worthy Sir Richard in consequence of his 
distinction in medicine, and he himself bears witness to 
William's contempt for poetry. 

" Reverse of Louis he, example rare, 
Loved to deserve the praise he could not bear. 
He shunned the acclamations of the throng, 
And always coldly heard the poet's song. 
Hence the great King the Muses did neglect, 
And the mere poet met with small respect." ' 

Such political verse as we find in this reign generally 
consists, like Halifax's Epistle to Lord Dorset, or Addi- 
son's own Address to King WiUiam, of hyperbolical flat- 
tery. Opposition was extinct, for both parties had for 
the moment united to promote the Revolution, and the 
only discordant notes amid the chorus of adulation pro- 
ceeded from Jacobite writers concealed in the garrets and 
cellars of Grub Street. Such an atmosphere was not fa- 
' Blackmore, The Kit-Kats. 



58 ADDISON. [chap. 

vorable to the production of literature of an elevated or 
even of a characteristic order. 

Addison's return to England coincided most happily 
with another remarkable turn of the tide. Leaning de- 
cidedly to the Tory party, who were now strongly leavened 
with the Jacobite element, Anne had not long succeeded 
to the throne before she seized an opportunity for dis- 
missing the Whig Ministry whom she found in possession 
of office. The Whigs, equally alarmed at the influence 
acquired by their rivals, and at the danger which threat- 
ened the Protestant succession, neglected no effort to 
counterbalance the loss of their sovereign's favour by 
strengthening their credit with the people. Having been 
trained in a school which had at least qualified them to 
appreciate the influence of style, the aristocratic leaders 
of the party wei'e well aware of the advantages they would 
derive by attracting to themselves the services of the ablest 
writei's of the day. Hence they made it their policy to 
mingle with men of letters on an equal footing, and to 
hold out to them an expectation of a share in the advan- 
tages to be reaped from the overthrow of theii- rivals. 

The result of this union of forces was a great increase 
in the number of literary - political clubs. In its half- 
aristocratic, half-democratic constitution the club was the 
natural product of enlarged political freedom, and helped 
to extend the organisation of polite opinion beyond the 
narrow orbit of Court society. Addison himself, in his 
simple style, points out the nature of the fundamental 
principle of Association which he observed in operation 
all around him. " When a set of men find themselves 
agree in any particular, though never so trivial, they estab- 
lish themselves into a kind of fraternity, and meet onoe or 
twice a week upon the account of such a fantastic resem-' 



iv.J HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 59 

blance." ' Among these societies, in the first years of the 
eighteenth century, the most celebrated was, perhaps, the 
Kit-Kat Chib. It consisted of thirty -nine of the lead- 
ing men of the Whig party ; and, though many of these 
were of the highest rank, it is a characteristic fact that the 
founder of the club should have been the bookseller Jacob 
Tonson. It was probably through his influence, joined to 
that of Halifax, that Addison was elected a member of 
the society soon after his return to England. Among its 
prominent members was the Duke of Somerset, the first 
meeting between whom and Addison, after the correspond- 
ence that had passed between them, must have been some- 
what embarrassing. The club assembled at one Christopher 
Catt's, a pastry-cook, who gave his name both to the society 
and the mutton-pies which were its ordinary entertainment. 
Each member was compelled to select a lady as his toast, 
and the verses which he composed in her honour were en- 
graved on the wine-glasses belonging to the club. Addi- 
son chose the Countess of Manchester, whose acquaintance 
he had made in Paris, and complimented her in the follow- 
ing lines : 

" While haughty Gallia's dames, that spread 
O'er their pale cheeks an artful red, 
Beheld this beauteous stranger there, 
In native charms divinely fair, 
Confusion in their looks they showed, 
And with unborrowed blushes glowed." 

Circumstances seemed now to be conspiring in favour 
of the Whigs. The Tories, whose strength lay mainly in ^ 
the Jacobite element, were jealous of Marlborough's ascen- 
dency over the Queen ; on the other hand, the Duchess of 
Marlborough, who was rapidly acquiring the chief place 
' Spectator, No. 9. 



60 ADDISON. [chap., 

in Anne's affections, intrigued in favour of the opposite 
faction. In spite, too, of her Tory predilections, the 
Queen, finding her throne menaced by the ambition of 
Louis XIV., was compelled in self-defence to look for sup- 
port to the party which had most vigorously identified 
itself with the principles of the Revolution. She bestowed 
her unreserved confidence on Marlborough, and he, in order 
to counterbalance the influence of the Jacobites, threw him- 
self into the arms of the Whigs; Being named Captain- 
General in 1704, he undertook the campaign which he 
brought to so glorious a conclusion on the 2d of August 
in that year at the battle of Blenheim. 

Godolphin, who, in the absence of Marlborough, occupied 
'the chief place in the Ministry, moved perhaps by patriotic 
feeling, and no doubt also by a sense of the advantage 
which his party would derive from this great victory, was 
anxious that it should be commemorated in adequate verse. 
He accordingly applied to Halifax as the person to whom 
the sacer votes required for the occasion would probably 
be known. Halifax has had the misfortune to have his 
character transmitted to posterity by two poets who hated 
him either on public or private grounds. Swift describes 
him as the would - be " Maecenas of the nation," but in- 
sinuates that he neglected the wants of the poets whom 
he patronised: / 

" Himself as rich as fifty Jews, 
Was easy though they wanted shoes." 

Pope also satirises the vanity and meanness of his disposi- 
tion in the well-known character of Bufo. Such portraits, 
though they are justified to some extent by evidence com- 
ing from other quarters, are not to be too strictly examined 
as if they bore the stamp of historic truth. It is, at any 



IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 61 

rate, certain that Halifax always proved himself a warm 
and zealous friend to Addison, and when Godolphin ap- 
plied to him for a poet to celebrate Blenheim, he answered 
that, though acquainted with a person who possessed every 
qualification for the task, he could not ask him to under- 
take it. Being pressed for his reasons, he replied "that 
while too many fools and blockheads were maintained in 
their pride and luxury at the public expense, such men as 
were really an honour to their age and country were shame- 
fully suffered to languish in obscurity ; that, for his own 
share, he would never desire any gentleman of parts and 
learning to employ his time in celebrating a Ministry who 
had neither the justice nor the generosity to make it worth 
his while." In answer to this the Lord Treasurer assured 
Halifax that any person whom he might name as equal to 
the required task, should have no cause to repent of hav- 
ing rendered his assistance ; whereupon Halifax mentioned 
Addison, but stipulated that all advances to the latter 
must come from Godolphin himself. Accordingly, Boyle, 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, afterwards Lord Carleton, 
was despatched on the embassy, and, if Pope is to be 
trusted, found Addison lodged up three pair of stairs over 
a small shop. He opened to him the subject, and informed 
him that, in return for the service that was expected of 
him, he was instructed to offer him a Commissionership of 
Appeal in the Excise, as a pledge of more considerable ad- 
vancement in the future. The fruits of this negotiation 
were The Campaign. 

Warton disposes of the merits of The Cam2Mign with 
the cavalier criticism, so often since repeated, that it is 
merely " a gazette in rhyme." In one sense the judgment 
is no doubt just. As a poem. The Campaign shows neither 
loftiness of invention nor enthusiasm of personal feeling, 



62 ADDISON. [chap. 

and it cannot therefore be ranked with sucli an ode as 
Horace's Qualem ministrum, or "vvith Pope's very fine 
Epistle to the Earl of Oxford after his disgrace. Its me- 
thodical narrative style is scarcely misrepresented by War- 
ton's sarcastic description of it; but it should be remem- 
bered that this style was adopted by Addison with delib- 
erate intention. " Thus," says he, in the conclusion of the 
poem, 

" Thus would I fain Britanuia's wars rehearse 
In the smooth records of a faithful verse ; 
That, if such numbers can o'er time prevail, 
May tell posterity the wondrous tale. 
When actions unadorned are faint and weak 
Cities and countries must be taught to speak ; 
Gods may descend in factions from the skies, 
And rivers from their oozy beds arise ; 
Fiction may deck the truth with spurious rays, 
And round the hero cast a borrowed blaze. 
Marlbro's exploits appear divinely bright, 
And proudly shine in their own native light ; 
Raised in themselves their genuine charms they boast. 
And those that paint them truest praise them most." 

The design here avowed is certainly not poetical, but 
it is eminently business-like and extremely well adapted to 
the end in view. What Godolphin wanted was a set of 
complimentary verses on Marlborough. Addison, with in- 
finite tact, declares that the highest compliment that can 
be paid to the hero is to recite his actions in their una- 
dorned grandeur. This happy turn of flattery shows how 
far he had advanced in literary skill since he wrote his ad- 
dress To the King. He had then excused himself for the 
inadequate celebration of William's deeds on the plea that, 
great though these might be, they were too near the poet's 
own time to be seen in proper focus. A thousand yeara 



IT.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 63 

hence, he suggests, some Homer may be inspired by the 
theme, " and Boyne be sung when it has ceased to flow." 
This could not have been very consolatory to a mortal 
craving for contemporary applause, and the apology of- 
fered in The Campaign for the prosaic treatment of the 
subject is far more dexterous. Bearing in mind the fact 
that it was written to order, and that the poet deliberately 
declined to avail himself of the aid of fiction, we must al- 
low that the construction of the poem exhibits both art 
and dignity. The allusion to the vast slaughter at Blen- 
heim, in the opening paragraph — 

" Rivers of blood I see and hills of slain, 
An Iliad rising out of one campaign" — 

is not very fortunate ; but the lines describing the ambi- 
tion of Louis XIV. are weighty and dignified, and the 
couplet indicating, througb the single image of the Dan- 
ube, the vast extent of the French encroachments, shows 
how thoroughly Addison was imbued with the spirit of 
classical poetry: 

" The rising Danube its long race began, 
And half its course through the new conquests ran." 

With equal felicity he describes the position and interven- 
tion of England, seizing at the same time the opportunity 
for a panegyric on her free institutions : 

"Thrice happy Britain, from the kingdoms rent 
To sit the guardian of the Continent ! 
That sees her bravest sons advanced so high 
And flourishing so near her prince's eye ; 
Thy favourites grow not up by fortune's sport, 
Or from the crimes and follies of a court : 
On the firm basis of desert they rise, 
From long-tried faith and friendship's holy ties, 



64 ADDISON. [chap. 

Their sovereign's well-distinguished smiles they share, 

Her ornaments in peace, her strength in war ; 

The nation thanks them with a public voice, 

By showers of blessings Heaven approves their choice ; 

Envy itself is dumb, in wonder lost. 

And factions strive who shall applaud them most." 

He proceeds in a stream of calm and equal verse, enlivened 
by dexterous allusions and occasional happy turns of ex- 
pression, to describe the scenery of the Moselle ; the march 
between the Maese and the Danube ; the heat to which the 
army was exposed ; the arrival on the Neckar ; and the 
track of devastation left by the French armies. The meet- 
ing between Marlborough and Eugene inspires him again 
to raise his style : 

" Great souls by instinct to each other turn, 
Demand alliance, and in friendship burn, 
A sudden friendship, while with outstretched rays 
They meet each other mingling blaze with blaze. 
Polished in courts, and hardened in the field, 
Renowned for conquest, and in council skilled. 
Their courage dwells not in a troubled flood 
Of mounting spirits and fermenting blood ; 
Lodged in the soul, with virtue overruled. 
Inflamed by reason, and by reason cooled. 
In hours of peace content to be unknown. 
And only in the field of battle shown : 
To souls like these in mutual friendship joined 
Heaven dares entrust the cause of human kind." 

The celebrated passage describing Marlborough's conduct 
at Blenheim is certainly the finest in the poem : 

" 'Twas then great Marlborough's mighty soul was proved 
That in the shock of charging hosts unmoved, 
Amidst confusion, horror, and despair, 
Examined all the dreadful scenes of war ; 



IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 65 

In peaceful thought the field of death surveyed, 
To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid, 
Inspired repulsed battalions to engage. 
And taught the doubtful battle where to rage. 
So when an angel by divine command 
With rising tempests shakes a guilty land. 
Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past, 
Calm and serene he drives the furious blast; 
And pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform. 
Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." 

Johnson makes some cliaracteristic criticisms on this sim- 
ile, which indeed, he maintains, is not a simile, but " an 
exemplification." He says : " Marlborough is so like the 
angel in the poem that the action of both is almost the 
same, and performed by both in the same manner. Marl- 
borough ' teaches the battle to rage ;' the angel ' directs the 
storm;' Marlborough is 'unmoved in peaceful thought;' 
the angel is ' calm and serene ;' Marlborough stands ' un- 
moved amid the shock of hosts;' the angel rides 'calm in 
the whirlwind.' The lines on Marlborough are just and 
noble ; but the simile gives almost the same images a sec- 
ond time." 

This judgment would be unimpeachable if the force of 
the simile lay solely in the likeness between Marlborough 
and the angel, but it is evident that equal stress is to be 
laid on the resemblance between the battle and the storm. 
It was Addison's intention to raise in the mind of the 
reader the noblest possible idea of composure and design 
in the midst of confusion : to do this he selected an angel 
as the minister of the divine purpose, and a storm as the 
symbol of fury and devastation ; and, in order to heighten 
his effect, he recalls with true art the violence of the par- 
ticular tempest which had recently ravaged the country. 
Johnson has noticed the close similarity between the per- 



66 ADDISON. [chap. 

sons of Marlborongli and the angel ; but he has exagger- 
ated the resemblance between the actions in which they 
are severally engaged. 

The Campaign completely fulfilled the purpose for which 
it was written. It strengthened the position of the Whig 
Ministry, and secured for its author the advancement that 
had been promised him. Early in 1706 Addison, on the 
recommendation of Lord Godolphin, was promoted from 
the Commissionership of Appeals in Excise to be Under- 
Secretary of State to Sir Charles Hedges. The latter was 
one of the few Tories who had retained their position in 
the Ministry since the restoration of the Whigs to the fa- 
vour of their sovereign, and he, too, shortly vanished from 
the stage like his more distinguished friends, making way 
for the Earl of Sunderland, a staunch Whig, and son-in- 
law to the Duke of Marlborough. 

Addison's duties as Under-Secretary were probably not 
particularly arduous. In 1705 he was permitted to at- 
tend Lord Halifax to the Court of Hanover, whither the 
latter was sent to carry the Act for the Naturalisation 
of the Electress Sophia. The mission also included Van- 
brugh, who, as Clarencieux King-at-Arms, was charged to 
invest the Elector with the Order of the Garter ; the party 
thus constituted affording a remarkable illustration of the 
influence exercised by literature over the politics of the 
period. Addison must have obtained during this jour- 
ney considerable insight into the nature of England's 
foreign policy, as, besides establishing the closest re- 
lations with Hanover, Halifax was also instructed to 
form an alliance with the United Provinces for securing 
the succession of the House of Brunswick to the English 
throne. 

In the meantime his imagination was not idle. After 



IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 67 

helping Steele in the composition of his Tender Husband, 
which was acted in 1705, he found time for engaging in 
a fresh literary enterprise of his own. The principles of 
operatic music, which had long been developed in Italy, 
had been slow in making their way to this country. Their 
introduction had been delayed partly by the French prej- 
udices of Charles II., but more, perhaps, by the strong 
insular tastes of the people, and by the vigorous forms of 
the native drama. What the untutored English audience 
liked best to hear was a well-marked tune, sung in a fine 
natural way : the kind of music which was in vogue on 
the stage till the end of the seventeenth century was sim- 
ply the regular drama interspersed with airs ; recitative 
was unknown ; and there was no attempt to cultivate the 
voice according to the methods practised in the Italian 
schools. But with the increase of wealth and travel more 
exacting tastes began to prevail ; Italian singers appeared 
on the stage and exhibited to the audience capacities of 
voice of which they had hitherto had no experience. In 
1705 was acted at the Hayraarket Arsinoe, the first opera 
constructed in England on avowedly Italian principles. 
The words were still in English, but the dialogue was 
throughout in recitative. The composer was Thomas Clay- 
ton, who, though a man entirely devoid of genius, had 
travelled in Italy, and was eager to turn to account the 
experience which he had acquired. In spite of its bad- 
ness Arsinoe greatly impressed the public taste ; and it 
was soon followed by Camilla, a version of an opera by 
Bononcini, portions of which were sung in Italian, and 
portions in English — an absurdity on which Addison just- 
ly comments in a number of the Spectator. His remarks 
on the consequences of translating the Italian operas are 
equally humorous and just. 
4 



68 ADDISON. [chap. 

" As there was no great danger," says he, " of hurting the sense 
of these extraordinary pieces, our authors would often make words 
of their own which were entirely foreign to the meaning of the pas- 
sages they pretended to translate ; their chief care being to make 
the numbers of the English verse answer to those of the Italian, that 
both of them might go to the same tune. Thus the famous song in 

Camilla, 

' Barbara si t'intendo,' etc. 

' Barbarous woman, yes, I know your meauing," 

which expresses the resentment of an angry lover, was translated 
into that English lamentation, 

' Frail are a lover's hopes,' etc. 

And it was pleasant enough to see the most refined persons of the 
British nation dying away and languishing to notes that were filled 
with the spirit of rage and indignation. It happened also very fre- 
quently where the sense was rightly translated ; the necessary trans- 
position of words, which were drawn out of the phrase of one tongue 
into that of another, made the music appear very absurd in one 
tongue that was very natural in the other. I remember an Italian 
verse that ran thus, word for word : 

' And turned my rage into pity,' 

which the English, for rhyme's sake, translated, 

' Aud into pity turned my rage.' 

By this means the soft notes that were adapted to pity in the Ital- 
ian fell upon the word ' rage ' in the English ; and the angry sounds 
that were turned to rage in the original were made to express pity 
in the translation. It oftentimes happened likewise that the finest 
notes in the air fell upon the most insignificant word in the sentence. 
I have known the word ' and ' pursued through the whole gamut ; 
have been entertained with many a melodious ' the ;' and have heard 
the most beautiful graces, quavers, and divisions bestowed upon 
' then,' ' for,' and ' from,' to the eternal honour of our English par- 
ticles." > 

Perceiving these radical defects, Addison seems to have 
been ambitious of showing by example bow they might 
' Spectator, No. 18. 



IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 69 

be remedied. " The great success this opera {A^'sinoe) 
met with produced," says he, " some attempts of form- 
ing pieces upon Italian plans, which should give a more 
natural and reasonable entertainment than what can be 
met with in the elaborate trifles of that nation. This 
alarmed the poetasters and fiddlers of the town, who were 
used to deal in a more ordinary kind cf ware, and there- 
fore laid down an established rule, which is received as 
such to this day, * That nothing is capable of being well 
set to music that is not nonsense.' " ' The allusion to 
the failure of the writer's own opera of Rosamond is un- 
mistakable. The piece was performed on the 2d of April, 
1706, but was coldly received, and after two or three rep- 
resentations was withdrawn. 

The reasons which the Spectator assigns for the catas- 
trophe betray rather the self-love of the author than the 
clear perception of the critic. Rosamond failed because, 
in the first place, it was very bad as a musical composi- 
tion. Misled by the favour with which Arsinoe was re- 
ceived, Addison seems to have regarded Clayton as a great 
musician, and he put his poem into the hands of the lat- 
ter, thinking that his score would be as superior to that 
of Arisinoe as his own poetry was to the words of that 
opera. Clayton, however, had no genius, and only suc- 
ceeded in producing what Sir John Hawkins, quoting with 
approbation the words of another critic, calls " a confused 
chaos of music, the only merit of which is its shortness.'"^ 

But it may be doubted whether in any case the most 
skilful composer could have produced music of a high 
order adapted to the poetry of Rosamond. The play is 
neither a tragedy, a comedy, nor a melodrama. It seems 

' Spectator, No. 18. 

' Sir John Hawkins' History of Music, vol. v. p. 137. 



10 ADDISON. [chap. 

that Eleanor did not really poison Fair Rosamond, but 
only administered to her a sleeping potion, and, as she 
takes care to explain to the King, 

" The bowl with drowsy juices filled, 
From cold Egyptian drugs distilled, 
lu borrowed death has closed her eyes." 

This information proves highly satisfactory to the King, 
not only because he is gratified to find that Rosamond is 
not dead, but also because, even before discovering her 
supposed dead body, he had resolved, in consequence of 
a dream sent to him by his guardian angel, to terminate 
the relations existing between them. The Queen and he 
accordingly arrange, in a business-like manner, that Rosa- 
mond shall be quietly removed in her trance to a nunnery;- 
a reconciliation is then effected between the husband and 
wife, who, as we are led to suppose, live happily ever after. 
The main motive of the opera in Addison's mind ap- 
pears to have been the desire of complimenting the Marl- 
borough family. It is dedicated to the Duchess ; the war- 
like character of Henry naturally recalls the prowess of 
the great modern captain ; and the King is consoled by 
his guardian angel for the loss of Fair Rosamond with a 
vision of the future glories of Blenheim : 

" To calm thy grief and lull thy cares, 
Look up and see 
What, after long revolving years, 

Thy bower shall be ! 
When time its beauties shall deface. 
And only with its ruins grace 
The future prospect of the place ! 
Behold the glorious pile ascending, 
Columns swelling, arches bending, 
Domes in awful pomp arising, 
Art in curious strokes surprising, 



IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 11 

Foes in figured fights contending, 
Behold the glorious pile ascending." 

This is graceful enough, but it scarcely offers material 
for music of a serious kind. Nor can the Court have been 
greatly impressed by the compliment paid to its morality, 
as contrasted with that of Charles II., conveyed as it was 
by the mouth of Grideline, one of the comic characters in 
the piece — 

" Since conjugal passion 
Is come into fashion, 
And marriage so blest on the throne is, 
Like a Venus I'll shine. 
Be fond and be fine. 
And Sir Trusty shall be my Adonis." 

The ill success of Rosamond confirmed Addison's dis- 
like to the Italian opera, which he displayed both in bis 
grave and humorous papers on the subject in the Specta- 
tor. The disquisition upon the various actors of the lion 
in Hydaspes is one of his happiest inspirations ; but his 
serious criticisms are, as a rule, only just in so far as they 
are directed against the dramatic absurdities of the Ital- 
ian opera. As to his technical qualifications as a critic of 
music, it will be sufficient to cite the opinion of Dr. Bur- 
ney : " To judges of music nothing more need be said of 
Mr. Addison's abilities to decide concerning the compara- 
tive degrees of national excellence in the art, and the merit 
of particular masters, than his predilection for the produc 
tions of Clayton, and insensibility to the force and origi- 
nality of Handel's compositions in Rinaldoy * 

In December, 1708, the Earl of Sunderland was displaced 
to make room for the Tory Lord Dartmouth, and Addison, 
as Under-Secretary, following the fortunes of his superior, 

• Barney's History of Music, vol. iv. p. 203. 



72 ADDISON. [chap. 

found himself again wiihout employment. Fortunately 
for liim the Earl of Wharton was almost immediately 
afterwards made Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, and offered 
him the lucrative post of Secretary. The Earl, who was 
subsequently created a Marquis, was the father of the 
famous Duke satirised in Pope's first Moral Essay ; he 
was in every respect the opposite of Addison — a vehement 
Republican, a sceptic, unprincipled in his morals, venal in 
his methods of Government. He was nevertheless a man 
of the finest talents, and seems to have possessed the 
power of gaining personal ascendency over his companions 
by a profound knowledge of character. An acquaintance 
with Addison, doubtless commencing at the Kit-Kat Club, 
of which both were members, had convinced him that the 
latter had eminent qualifications for the task, which the 
Secretary's post would involve, of dealing with men of very 
various conditions. Of the feelings with which Addison 
on his side regarded the Earl we have no record. "It is 
reasonable to suppose," says Johnson, " that he counter- 
acted, as far as he was able, the malignant and blasting in- 
fluence of the Lieutenant ; and that, at least, by his inter- 
vention some good was done and some mischief prevented." 
Not a sh'adow of an imputation, at any rate, rests upon his 
own conduct as Secretary. He appears to have acted 
strictly on that conception of public duty which he defines 
in one of his papers in the Spectator. Speaking of the 
marks of a corrupt official, " Such an one," he declares, " is 
the man who, upon any pretence whatsoever, receives more 
than what is the stated and unquestioned fee of his office. 
Gratifications, tokens of thankfulness, despatch money, and 
the like specious terms, are the pretences under which cor- 
ruption very frequently shelters itself. An honest man 
will, however, look on all these methods as unjustifiable, 



IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. V3 

and will enjoy himself better in a moderate fortune, that is 
gained with honour and reputation, than in an overgrown 
estate that is cankered with the acquisitions of rapine and 
exaction. Were all our offices discharged with such an 
inflexible integrity, we should not see men in all ages, who 
grow up to exorbitant wealth, with the abilities which are 
to be met with in an ordinary mechanic." ' His friends 
perhaps considered that his impartiality was somewhat 
overstrained, since he always declined to remit the custom- 
ary fees in their favour. " For," said he, " I may have 
forty friends, whose fees may be two guineas a-piece ; then 
I lose eighty guineas, and my friends gain but two a-piece." 
He took with him as his own Secretary, Eustace Bud- 
gell, who was related to him, and for whom he seems to 
have felt a warm affection. Budgell was a man of consid- 
erable literary ability, and was the writer of the various 
papers in the Spectator signed "X," some of which suc- 
ceed happily in imitating Addison's style. While he was 
under his friend's guidance his career was fairly successful, 
but his temper was violent, and when, at a later period of 
his life, he served in Ireland under a new Lieutenant and 
another Secretary, he became involved in disputes which 
led to his dismissal. A furious pamphlet against the Lord- 
Lieutenant, the Duke of Bolton, published by him in spite 
of Addison's remonstrances, only complicated his position, 
and from this period his fortunes steadily declined. He 
lost largely in the South Sea Scheme ; spent considerable 
sums in a vain endeavour to obtain a seat in Parliament ; 
and at last came under the influence of his kinsman, Tin- 
dal, the well-known deist, whose will he is accused of hav- 
ing falsified. With his usual infelicity he happened to 
rouse the resentment of Pope, and was treated in conse- 
' Spectator, No. 469. 



'74 ADDISON. [chap. 

queuce to one of the deadly couplets with which that 
great poet was in the habit of repaying real or supposed 
injuries : 

" Let Budgell charge low Grub Street on his quill, 
And write whate'er he pleased — except his will." 

The lines were memorable, and were doubtless often quot- 
ed, and the wretched man finding his life insupportable, 
ended it by drowning himself in the Thames, 

During his residence in Ireland Addison firmly ce- 
mented his friendship with Swift, whose acquaintance he 
had probably made after The Campaign had given him 
a leading position in the Whig party, on the side of 
which the sympathies of both were then enlisted. Swift's 
admiration for Addison was warm and generous. Wben 
the latter was on the point of embarking on his new 
duties, Swift wrote to a common friend, Colonel Hunter, 
" Mr. Addison is hurrying away for Ireland, and I pray 
too much business may not spoil le plus honnete homme du 
mondey To Archbishop King he wrote : " Mr. Addison, 
who goes over our first secretary, is a most excellent 
person, and being my intimate friend I shall use all my 
credit to set him right in his notions of persons and 
things." Addison's duties took him occasionally to Eng- 
land, and during one of his visits Swift writes to him 
from Ireland: "I am convinced that whatever Govern- 
ment come over you will find all marks of kindness from 
any parliament here with respect to your employment, 
the Tories contending with the Whigs which should 
speak best of you. In short, if you will come over again 
when you are at leisure we will raise an army and make 
you King of Ireland. Can you think so meanly of a 
kingdom as not to be pleased that every creature in it, 



IV.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN AFFAIRS OF STATE. 75 

who bath one grain of worth, has a veneration for you ?" 
In his Journal to Stella he says, under date of October 
12, 1710: "Mr. Addison's election has passed easy and 
undisputed ; and I beheve if he had a mind to be chosen 
king he would hardly be refused." On his side Addison's 
feelings were equally warm. He presented Swift with 
a copy of his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, inscrib- 
ing it — " To the most agreeable companion, the truest 
friend, and the greatest genius of his age." 

This friendship, founded on mutual respect, was des- 
tined to be impaired by political differences. In 1710 
the credit of the Whig Ministry had been greatly under- 
mined by the combined craft of Harley and Mrs. Masham, 
and Swift, who was anxious as to his position, on coming 
over to England to press his claims on Somers and 
Halifax, found that they were unable to help him. He 
appears to have considered that their want of power 
proceeded from want of will ; at any rate, he made ad- 
vances to Harley, which were of course gladly received. 
The Ministry were at this time being hard pressed by 
the Uxa7niner, under the conduct of Prior, and at their 
instance Addison started the Whig Examiner in their 
defence. Though this paper was written effectively and 
with admirable temper, party polemics were little to the 
taste of its author, and, after five numbers, it ceased to 
exist on the 8th of October. Swift, now eager for the 
triumph of the Tories, expresses his delight to Stella 
by informing her, in the words of a Tory song, that " it 
was down among the dead men." He himself wrote the 
first of his Examiners on the 2d of the following Novem- 
ber, and the crushing blows with which he followed it 
up did much to hasten the downfall of the Ministry. 
As was natural, Addison was somewhat displeased at his 
4* 



16 ADDISO^\ [chap. 

friend's defection. In December Swift writes to Stella, 
" Mr. Addison and I are as different as black and white, 
and I believe our friendship will go off by this d busi- 
ness of party. He cannot bear seeing me fall in so with 
the Ministry ; but I love him still as much as ever, though 
we seldom meet." In January, 1710-11, he says: "I 
called at the coffee-house, where I had not been in a week, 
and talked coldly awhile with Mr. Addison ; all our friend- 
ship and dearness are off ; we are civil acquaintance, talk 
words, of course, of when we shall meet, and that's all. 
Is it not odd ?" Many similar entries follow ; but on 
June 26, 1711, the record is : " Mr. Addison and I talked 
as usual, and as if we had seen one another yesterday," 
And on September 14, he observes: "This evening I met 
Addison and pastoral Philips in the Park, and supped 
with them in Addison's lodgings. We were very good 
company, and I yet know no man half so agreeable to me 
as he is. I sat with them till twelve." 

It was perhaps through the influence of Swift, who 
spoke warmly with the Tory Ministry on behalf of Addi- 
son, that the latter, on the downfall of the Whigs in the 
autumn of 1710, was for some time suffered to retain the 
Keepership of the Records in Berraingham's Tower, an 
Irish place which had been bestowed upon him by the 
Queen as a special mark of the esteem with which she 
regarded him, and which appears to have been worth 
£400 a year.^ In other respects his fortunes were greatly 
altered by the change of Ministry. " I have within this 
twelvemonth," he writes to Wortley on the 21st of July, 
1711, "lost a place of £2000 per ann., an estate in the 
Indies worth £14,000, and, what is worse than all the 

^ Fourth Drapier's Letter. 



IF.] HIS EMPLOYMENT IN ATE AIRS OF STATE. 11 

rest, my mistress.' Hear this and wonder at my philoso- 
phy ! I find they are going to take away my Irish place 
from me too ; to which I must add that I have just re- 
signed my fellowship, and that stocks sink every day." 
In spite of these losses his circumstances were materially 
different from those in which he found himself after the 
fall of the previous Whig Ministry in 1702. Before the 
close of the year 1711 he was able to buy the estate of 
Bilton, near Rugby, for £10,000. Part of the purchase 
money was probably provided from what he had saved 
while he was Irish Secretary, and had invested in the 
funds ; and part was, no doubt, made up from the profits 
of the Tatler and the Spectator. Miss Aikin says that 
a portion was advanced by his brother Gulston ; but this 
seems to be an error. Two years before, the Governor of 
Fort St. George had died, leaving him his executor and 
residuary legatee. This is no doubt "the estate in the 
Indies " to which he refers in his letter to Wortley, but 
he had as yet derived no benefit from it. His brother 
had left his affairs in great confusion ; the trustees were 
careless or dishonest ; and though about £600 was remitted 
to him in the shape of diamonds in 1713, the liquidation 
was not complete till 1716, when only a small moiety of 
the sum bequeathed to him came into his hands.* 

' Who the " mistress " was cannot be certainly ascertained. See, 
however, p. 146. 
« Egerton MSS., British Museum (1972). 



CHAPTER V. 

THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 

The career of Addison, as described in the preceding 
chapters, has exemplified the great change effected in the 
position of men of letters in England by the Restoration 
and the Revolution ; it is now time to exhibit him in his 
most characteristic light, and to show the remarkable ser- 
vice the eighteenth century essayists performed for Eng- 
lish society in creating an organised public opinion. It 
is difficult for ourselves, who look on the action of the 
periodical press as part of the regular machinery of life, 
to appreciate the magnitude of the task accomplished by 
Addison and Steele in the pages of the Tatler and S2^ec- 
tator. Every day, week, month, and quarter now sees the 
issue of a vast munber of journals and magazines intended 
to form the opinion of every order and section of society ; 
but in the reign of Queen Anne the only centres of soci- 
ety that existed were the Court, with the aristocracy that 
revolved about it, and the clubs and coffee-houses, in 
which the commercial and professional classes met to ''dis- 
cuss matters of general interest. The Tatler and Sjyec- 
tator were the first organs in which an attempt was made 
to give form and consistency to the opinion arising out 
of this social contact. Bat we should form a very erro- 
neous idea of the character of these publications if we 



CHAP, v.] TEE TATLEE AND SPEC TA TOE. 79 

regarded them as the sudden productions of individual 
genius, written in satisfaction of a mere temporary taste. 
Like all masterpieces in art and literature, they mark the 
final stage of a long and painful journey, and the merit 
of their inventors consists largely in the judgment with 
which they profited by the experience of many predeces- 
sors. 

The first newspaper published in Europe was the Gaz- 
zetta of Ycnice, which was written in manuscript, ^nd read 
aloud at certain places in the city, to supply information 
to the people during the war with the Turks in 1536. 
In England it was not till the reign of Elizabeth that the 
increased facilities of communication and the growth of 
wealth caused the purveyance of news to become a profit- 
able employment. Towards the end of the sixteenth cen- 
tury newsmongers began to issue little pamphlets report- 
ing extraordinary intelligence, but not issued at regular 
periods. The titles of these publications, which are all 
of them that survive, show that the arts with which the 
framers of the placards of our own newspapers endeavour 
to attract attention are of venerable antiquity : " Wonder- 
ful and Strange newes out of Suffolke and Essex, where 
it rained wheat the space of six or seven miles" (1583); 
" Lamentable newes out of Monmouthshire, containinge 
the wonderfull and fearfuU accounts of the great overflow- 
ing of the waters in the said countrye" (1607).' 

In 1622 one Nathaniel Butter began to publish a news- 
paper bearing a fixed title and appearing at stated inter- 
vals. It was called the Weeklt/ Newes from Italy and 
Germanie, etc., and was said to be printed for Mercurius 
Britannicus. This novelty provided much food for mer- 
riment to the poets, and Ben Jonson in his Staple of News 
' Andrews' History of British Journalism. 



80 ADDISON. [chap. 

satirises Butter, under tlie name of Nathaniel, in a pas- 
sage which the curious reader will do well to consult, as 
it shows the low estimation in which newspapers were 
then held,' 

Though it might appear from Jonson's dialogue that 
the newspapers of that day contained many items of do- 
mestic intelligence, such was scarcely the case. Butter and 
his contemporaries, as was natural to men who confined 
themselves to the publication of news without attempting 
to form opinion, obtained their materials almost entirely 
from abroad, whereby they at once aroused more vividly 
the imagination of their readers, and doubtless gave more 
scope to their own invention. Besides, they were not at 
liberty to retail home news of that political kind which 
would have been of the greatest interest to the public. 
For a long time the evanescent character of the newspaper 
allowed it to escape the attention of the licenser, but the 
growing demand for this sort of reading at last brought it 
under supervision, and so strict was the control exercised 
over even the reports of foreign intelligence that its week- 
ly appearance was frequently interrupted. 

In 1641, however, the Star-chamber was abolished, and 
the heated political atmosphere of the times generated a 
new species of journal, in which we find the first attempt 
to influence opinion through the periodical press. This 
was the newspaper known under the generic title of Mer- 
cury. Many weekly publications of this name appeared 
during the Civil Wars on the side of both King and Par- 
liament, Mercurius Anlicus being the representative organ 
of the Royalist cause, and Mercurius Pragmaticus and Mer- 
curius Politicus of the Republicans. Party animosities 
were thus kept alive, and proved so inconvenient to the 
■ Staple of News, Act I. Scene 2. 



v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 81 

Government that the Parliament interfered to curtail the 
liberty of the press. In 1647 an ordinance passed the 
House of Lords, prohibiting any person from " making, 
writing, printing, selling, publishing, or uttering, or caus- 
ing to be made, any book, sheet, or sheets of news what- 
soever, except the same be licensed by both or either House 
of Parliament, with the name of the author, printer, and 
licenser affixed." In spite of this prohibition, which was 
renewed by Act of Parliament in 1662, many unlicensed 
periodicals continued to appear, till in 1663 the Govern- 
ment, finding their repressive measures insufficient, re- 
solved to grapple with the difficulty by monopolising the 
right to publish news. 

The author of this new project was the well-known 
Rog^r L'Estrange, who in 1663 obtained a patent assign- 
ing to him " all the sole privilege of writing, printing, and 
publishing all Narratives, Advertisements, Mercuries, In- 
telligencers, Diurnals, and other books of public intelli- 
gence." L'Estrange's journal was called the Public Intelli- 
gencer; it was published once a week, and in its form was 
a rude anticipation of the modern newspaper, containing 
as it did an obituary, reports of the proceedings in Parlia- 
ment and in the Court of Claims, a list of the circuits of 
the judges, of sheriffs, Lent preachers, etc. After being 
continued for two years it gave place first, in 1665, to the 
Oxford Gazette, published at Oxford, whither the Court 
had retired during the plague ; and in 1666 to the London 
Gazette, which was under the immediate control of an 
Under-Secretary of State. The office of Gazetteer became 
henceforth a regular ministerial appointment, and was 
viewed with different eyes according as men were affected 
towards the Government. Steele, who held it, says of it : 
"My next appearance as a writer was in the quality of the 



82 ADDISON. [chap. 

lowest Minister of State — to wit, in the office of Gazetteer; 
where I worked faithfully according to order, without ever 
erring against the rule observed by all Ministers, to keep 
that paper very innocent and very insipid." Pope, on the 
other hand, who regarded it as an organ published to in- 
fluence opinion in favour of the Government, is constant 
in his attacks upon it, and has immortalised it in the mem- 
orable lines in the Dunciad beginning, " Next plunged a 
feeble but a desperate pack," etc. 

In 1679 the Licensing Act passed in 1662 expired, and 
the Parliament declined to renew it. The Court was thus 
left without protection against the expression of public- 
opinion, which was daily becoming more bold and out- 
spoken. In his extremity the King fell back on the ser- 
vility of the judges, and, having procured from them an 
opinion that the publishing of any printed matter without 
license was contrary to the common law, he issued his fa- 
mous Proclamation (in 1680) "to prohibit and forbid all 
persons whatsoever to print or publish any news, book, or 
pamphlets of news, not licensed by his Majesty's author- 
ity." 

Disregard of the proclamation was treated as a breach 
of the peace, and many persons were punished accordingly. 
This severity produced the effect intended. The voice of 
the periodical press was stifled, and the London Gazette 
was left almost in exclusive possession of the field of news. 
When Monmouth landed in 1685 the King managed to 
obtain from Parliament a renewal of the Licensing Act for 
seven years, and even after the Revolution of 1688 several 
attempts were made by the Ministerial Whigs to prolong 
or to renew the operation of the Act. In spite, however, 
of the violence of the organs of " Grub Street," which had 
grown up under it, these attempts were unsuccessful ; it 



v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 83 

was justly felt that it was wiser to leave falsehood and 
scurrility to be gradually corrected by public opinion, as 
speaking through an unfettered press, than to attack them 
by a law which they had proved themselves able to defy. 
From 1682 the freedom of the press may therefore be said 
to date, and the lapse of the Licensing Act was the signal 
for a remarkable outburst of journalistic enterprise and in- 
vention. Not only did the newspapers devoted to the re- 
port of foreign intelligence reappear in greatly increased 
numbers, but, whereas the old Mercuries had never been 
published more than once in the same week, the new 
comers made their appearance twice and sometimes even 
three times. In 1702 was printed the first daily newspa- 
per. The Daily Courant. It could only at starting provide 
material to cover one side of a half sheet of paper ; but 
the other side was very soon covered with printed matter, 
in which form its existence was prolonged till 1735. 

The development of party government of course encour- 
aged the controversial capacities of the journalist, and 
many notorious, and some famous names are now found 
among the combatants in the political arena. On the side 
of the Whigs the most redoubtable champions were Dan- 
iel Defoe, of the Review, who was twice imprisoned and 
once set in the pillory for his political writings ; John Tut- 
chin, of the Ohservator ; and Ridpath, of the Flying Post 
— all of whom have obtained places in the Dunciad. The 
old Tories appear to have been satisfied during the early 
part of Queen Anne's reign with prosecuting the newspa- 
pers that attacked them ; but Harley, who understood the 
power of the press, engaged Prior to harass the Whigs in 
the Examiner, and was afterwards dexterous enough to se- 
cure the invaluable assistance of Swift for the same paper. 
In opposition to the Examiner in its early days the Whigs, 



84 ADDISON. [chap. 

as ha*- been said, started the Whiff Examiner, under the 
auspices of Addison, so that the two great historical par- 
ties had their cases stated by the two greatest prose-writers 
of the first half of the eighteenth century. 

Beside the Quidnunc and the party politician, another 
class of reader now appeared demanding aliment in the 
press. Men of active and curious minds, with a little lei- 
sure and a large love of discussion, loungers at Will's or 
at the Grecian Coffee-Houses, were anxious to have their 
doubts on all subjects resolved by a printed oracle. Their 
tastes were gratified by the ingenuity of John Dunton, 
whose strange account of his Life and Errors throws a 
strong light on the literary history of this period. In 
1690 Dunton published his Athenian Gazette, the name 
of which he afterwards altered to the Athenian Mercury. 
The object of this paper was to answer questions put to 
the editor by the public. These were of all kinds — on re- . 
ligion, casuistry, love, literature, and manners — no question 
being too subtle or absurd to extract a reply from the con- 
ductor of the paper. The Athenian Mercury seems to 
have been read, by as many distinguished men of the pe- 
riod as Notes and Queries in our own time, and there can 
be no doubt that the quaint humours it originated gave 
the first hint to the inventors of the Tatler and the Spec- 
tator. 

Advertisements were inserted in the newspapers at a 
comparatively early period of their existence. The editor 
acted as middleman between the advertiser and the public, 
and made his announcements in a style of easy frankness 
which will appear to the modern reader extremely re- 
freshing. Thus, in the "Collection for the Improve- 
ment of Husbandry and Trade" (1682), there are the fol- 
lowing : 



v.] TRE T A TLER K-^D SPECTATOR. 85 

" If I can meet with a sober man that has a counter-tenc voice, 
I can help him to a place worth thirty pound the year or more. 

"If any noble or other gentleman wants a porter that is very 
lusty, comely, and six foot high and two inches, I can help. 

" I want a complete young man that will wear a livery, to wait on 
a very valuable gentleman ; but he must know how to play on a vio- 
lin or flute. 

" I want a genteel footman that can play on the violin, to wait on 
a person of honour." * 

Everytliing was now prepared for the production of a 
class of newspaper designed to form and direct public opin- 
ion on rational principles. The press was emancipated 
from State control ; a reading public had constituted 
itself out of the habitues of the coffee-houses and clubs; 
nothing was wanted but an inventive genius to adapt 
the materials at his disposal to the circumstances of the 
time. The required hero was not long in making his 
appearance. 

Richard Steele, the son of an official under the Irish Gov- 
ernment, was, above all things, " a creature of ebullient 
heart." Impulse and sentiment were with him always far 
stronger motives of action than reason, principle, or even 
interest. He left Oxford, without taking a degree, from 
an ardent desire to serve in the army, thereby sacrificing 
his prospect of succeeding to a family estate ; his extrav- 
agance and dissipation while serving in the cavahy were 
notorious ; yet this did not dull the clearness of his moral 
perceptions, for it was while his excesses were at their 
height that he dedicated to his commanding officer, Lord 
Cutts, his Christian Hero. Vehement in his political, as 
in all other feelings, he did not hesitate to resign the office 
he held under the Tory Government in 1711 in order to 
' Andrews' History of British Journalism. 



86 ADDISON. [chap. 

attack it for what he considered its treachery to the coun- 
try; but he was equally outspoten, and with equal disad- 
vantage to himself, when he found himself at a later period 
in disagreement with the Whigs. He had great fertility 
of invention, strong natural humour, true though unculti- 
vated taste, and inexhaustible human sympath3\ 

His varied experience had made him well acquainted with 
life and character, and in his office of Gazetteer he had had 
an opportunity of watching the eccentricities of the public 
taste, which, now emancipated from restraint, began vaguely 
to feel after new ideals. That, under such circumstances, 
he should have formed the design of treating current events 
from a humorous point of view was only natural, but he 
was indebted for the form of his newspaper to the most 
original genius of the age. Swift had early in the eigh- 
teenth century exercised his ironical vein by treating the 
everyday occurrences of life in a mock-heroic style. Among 
his pieces of this kind that were" most successful in. catch- 
ing the public taste were the humorous predictions of the 
death of Partridge, the astrologer, signed with the name 
of Isaac BickerstafE. Steele, seizing on the name and char- 
acter of Partridge's fictitious rival, turned him with much 
pleasantry into the editor of a new journal, the design of 
which he makes Isaac describe as follows : 

" The state of conversation and business in this town having long 
been perplexed with Pretenders in both kinds, in order to open men's 
minds against such abuses, it appeared no unprofitable undertaking 
to publish a Paper, which should observe upon the manners of the 
pleasurable, as well as the busy part of mankind. To make this gen- 
erally read, it seemed the most proper method to form it by way of a 
Letter of Intelligence, consisting of such parts as might gratify the 
curiosity of persons of all conditions and of each sex. . . . The gen- 
eral purposes of this Paper is to expose the false arts of life, to pull 
off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and to recom- 



v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 87 

mend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our be- 
haviour." ' 

The name of the Taller, Isaac informs us, was " invented 
in honour of the fair sex," for whose entertainment the new 
paper was largely designed. Tt appeared three times a 
week, and its price was a penny, though it seems that the 
first number, published April 12, 1709, was distributed gratis 
as an advertisement. In order to make the contents of the 
paper varied it was divided into five portions, of which the 
editor gives the following account : 

" All accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment, shall be 
under the article of White's Chocolate-House ; Poetry under that of 
Will's Coffee-House ; Learning under the title of Grecian ; Foreign 
and Domestic News you will have from Saint James' Coffee-House ; 
and what else I have to offer on any other subject shall be dated from 
my own apartment." ^ 

In this division we see the importance of the coffee- 
bouses as the natural centres of intelligence and opinion. 
Of the four houses mentioned, St. James' and White's, 
both of them in St. James' Street, were the chief haunts of 
statesmen and men of fashion, and the latter bad acquired 
an infamous notoriety for the ruinous gambling of its ha- 
hitues. Will's, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, kept up 
the reputation which it had procured in Dryden's time as 
the favourite meeting - place of men of letters ; while the 
Grecian, in Devereux Court in the Strand, which was the 
oldest coffee-house in London, afforded a convenient rendez- 
vous for the learned Templars. At starting, the design an- 
nounced in the first number was adhered to with tolerable 
fidelity. The paper dated from St. James' Coffee - House 
was always devoted to the recital of foreign news ; that 
from Will's either criticised the current dramas, or con- 
» Taller, No. 1. * Hid. 



88 ADDISON. [chap. 

tained a copy of verses from some author of repute, or a 
piece of general literary criticism ; the latest gossip at 
White's was reproduced in a fictitious form and with added 
colour. Advertisements were also inserted ; and half a 
sheet of the paper was left blank, in order that at the last 
moment the most recent intelligence might be added in 
manuscript, after the manner of the contemporary news- 
letters. In all these respects the character of the news- 
paper was preserved ; but in the method of treating news 
adopted by the editor there was a constant tendency to 
subordinate matter of fact to the elements of humour, fic- 
tion, and sentiment. In his survey of the manners of the 
time, Isaac, as an astrologer, was assisted by a familiar 
spirit, named Pacolet, who revealed to him the motives and 
secrets of men ; his sister, Mrs. Jenny DistafE, was occasion- 
ally deputed to produce the paper from the wizard's " own 
apartment;" and Kidney, the waiter at St. James' Coffee- 
House, was humorously represented as the chief authority 
in all matters of foreign intelligence. 

The mottoes assumed by the Taller at different periods 
of its existence mark the stages of its development. On 
its first appearance, when Steele seems to have intended it 
to be little more than a lively record of news, the motto 
placed at the head of each paper was 

" Quidquid agunt homines, 

nostri est farrago libelli." 

It soon became evident, however, that its true function 
was not merely to report the actions of men, but to discuss 
the propriety of their actions ; and by the time that sufla- 
cient material had accumulated to constitute a volume, the 
essayists felt themselves justified in appropriating the words 
used by Pliny in the preface to his Natural History : 



v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 89 

"Nemo apud nos qui idem tentaverit: equidem sentio peculiarem 
in studiis causam eonim esse, qui difficultatibus victis, utilitatem ju- 
vandi, protulerunt gratiae placendi. Res ardua vetustis novitatem 
dare, novis auctoritatem, obsoletis nitorem, fastidiis gratiam, dubiis 
fidem, omnibus vero naturam, et naturae sute omnia. Itaque non as- 
SECUTis voluisse, abunde pulclirum atque magnificum est." 

The disguise of the mock astrologer proved very useful 
to Steele in his character of moralist. It enabled him to 
give free utterance to his better feelings, without the risk of 
incurring the charge of inconsistency or hypocrisy, and noth- 
ing can be more honourable to him than the open manner 
in which he acknowledges his own unfitness for the position 
of a moralist : " I shall not carry my humility so far," says he, 
" as to call myself a vicious man, but at the same time must 
confess my life is at best but pardonable. With no greater 
character than this, a man would make but an indifferent 
progress in attacking prevailing and fashionable vices, which 
Mr. Bickerstaff has done with a freedom of spirit that would 
have lost both its beauty and eflBcacy had it been pretended 
to by Mr. Steele." ' 

As Steele cannot claim the sole merit of having invented 
the form of the Tatler, so, too, it must be remembered that 
he could never have addressed society ifi the high moral 
tone assumed by Bickerstaff if the road had not been pre- 
pared for him by others. One name among his predeces- 
sors stands out with a special title to honourable record. 
Since the Restoration the chief school of manners had 
been the stage, and the flagrant example of immorality set 
by the Court had been bettered by the invention of the 
comic dramatists of the period. Indecency was the fash- 
ion ; religion and sobriety were identified by the polite 
world with Puritanism and hypocrisy. Even the Church 
' Tb^fer. No. 271. 



90 ADDISON. [chap. 

had not yet ventured to say a word in behalf of virtue 
against the prevailing taste, and when at last a clergyman 
raised his voice on behalf of the principles which he pro- 
fessed, the blow which he dealt to his antagonists was the 
more damaging because it was entirely unexpected. Jer- 
emy Collier was not only a Tory but a Jacobite, not only 
a High Churchman but a Nonjuror, who had been out- 
lawed for his fidelity to the principles of Legitimism ; and 
that such a man should have published the Short View of 
the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, re- 
flecting, as the book did, in the strongest manner on the 
manners of the fallen dynasty, was as astounding as thun- 
der from a clear sky. Collier, however, was a man of sin- 
cere piety, whose mind was for the moment occupied only 
by the overwhelming danger of the evil which he proposed 
to attack. It is true that his method of attack was cum- 
brous, and that his conclusions w^ere far too sweeping and 
often unjust ; nevertheless, the general truth of his criti- 
cisms was felt to be irresistible. Congreve and Vanbrugh 
each attempted an apology for their profession; both, how- 
ever, showed their perception of the weakness of their po- 
sition by correcting or recasting scenes in their comedies 
to which Collier had objected. Dryden accepted the re- 
proof in a nobler spirit. Even while he had pandered to 
the tastes of the times, he had been conscious of his 
treachery to the cause of true art, and had broken out 
in a fine passage in his Ode to the Memory of Mrs. Kil- 
ligreto : 

" gracious God ! how far have we 
Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy ! 
Made prostitute and profligate the Muse, 
Debased to each obscene and impious use ! 



T.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 91 

" wretched we ! why were we hurried down 
This lubrique and adulterous age 
(Nay, added fat pollutions of our own) 

To increase the streaming ordure of the stage ?" 

When Collier attacked hira he bent his head in submission. 
"In many things," says he, "he has taxed me justly, and 
I have pleaded guilty to all thought and expressions of 
mine which can be truly argued of obscenity, profaneness, 
or immorality, and retract them. If he be my enemy, let 
hira triumph ; if he be my friend, as I have given him no 
personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad of my 
repentance." ' 

The first blow against fashionable immorality having 
been boldly struck, was followed up systematically. In 
1690 was founded "The Society for the Reformation of 
Manners," which published every year an account of the 
progress made in suppressing profaneness and debauchery 
by its means. It continued its operations till 1*738, and 
during its existence prosecuted, according to its own cal- 
culations, 101,683 persons. William III. showed himself 
prompt to encourage the movement which his subjects had 
begun. The London Gazette of 27th February, 1698-99, 
contains a report of the following remarkable order : 

"His Majesty being informed, That, notwithstanding an order 
made the 4th of June, 1697, by the Earl of Sunderland, then Lord 
Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household, to prevent the Prophane- 
ness and Immorality of the Stage, several Plays have been lately 
acted containing expressions contrary to Religion and Good Man- 
ners : and whereas the Master of the Revels has represented, That, 
in contempt of the said order, the actors do often neglect to leave 
out such Prophane and Indecent expressions as he has thought 
proper to be omitted. These are therefore to signifie his Majesty's 

' Preface to the Fablea. 



92 ADDISON. [chap. 

pleasure, that you do not hereafter presume to act anything in any 
play contrary to Religion and Good Manners as you shall answer it 
at your utmost peril. Given under my Hand this 18th of February, 
1698. In the eleventh year of his Majesty's reign." 

It is difficult to realise, in reading the terms of this or- 
der, that only thirteen years had elapsed since the death 
of Charles II., and undoubtedly a very large share of the 
credit due for such a revolution in the public taste is to 
be assigned to Collier, Collier, however, did nothing in a 
literary or artistic sense to improve the character of Eng- 
lish literature. His severity, uncompromising as that of 
the Puritans, inspired Vice with terror, but could not plead 
with persuasion on behalf of Virtue ; his sweeping conclu- 
sions struck at the roots of Art as well as of Immorality. 
He sought to destroy the drama and kindred pleasures 
of the Imagination, not to reform them. What the age 
needed was a waiter to satisfy its natural desires for healthy 
and rational amusement, and Steele, with his strongly-de- 
veloped twofold character, was the man of all others to 
bridge over the chasm between irreligious licentiousness 
and Puritanical rigidity. Driven headlong on one side of 
his nature towards all the tastes and pleasures which ab- 
sorbed the Court of Charles II., his heart in the midst of 
his dissipation never ceased to approve of whatever was 
great, noble, and generous. He has described himself with 
much feeling in his disquisition on the Rake, a character 
which he says many men are desirous of assuming without 
any natural qualifications for supporting it : 

"A Rake," says he, "is a man always to be pitied ; and if he lives 
one day is certainly reclaimed ; for his faults proceed not from choice 
or inclination, but from strong passions and appetites, which are in 
youth too violent for the curb of reason, good sense, good manners, 
and good nature; all which he must have by nature and education 



V.J THE TA TLER AND SPECTA TOR. 93 

before he can be allowed to be or to have been of this order. . . . His 
desires run away with him through the strength and force of a lively 
imagination, which hurries him on to unlawful pleasures before rea- 
son has power to come in to his rescue." 

That impulsiveness of feeling wbicli is here described, 
and whicb was tbe cause of so many of Steele's failings 
in real life, made him tbe most powerful and persuasive 
advocate of Virtue in fiction. Of all tbe imaginative 
English essayists be is tbe most truly natural. His large 
heart seems to rush out in sympathy with any tale of 
sorrow or exhibition of magnanimity ; and even in criti- 
cism, bis true natural instinct, joined to his constitu- 
tional enthusiasm, often raises his judgments to a level 
with those of Addison himself, as in bis excellent essay 
in the Spectator on Raphael's cartoons. Examples of 
these characteristics in his style are to be found in the 
Story of Unnion and Valentine,^ and in the fine paper 
describing two tragedies of real life ; * in the series of 
papers on duelling, occasioned by a duel into which he 
was himself forced against bis own inclination ; ' and in 
tbe sound advice which Isaac gives to bis half - sister 
Jenny on tbe morrow of her marriage.* Perhaps, bow- 
ever, tbe chivalry and generosity of feeling which make 
Steele's writings -so attractive ^are most apparent in tbe 
delightful paper containing the letter of Serjeant Hall 
from tbe camp before Mons. After pointing out to bis 
readers the admirable features in the Serjeant's simple 
letter, Steele concludes as follows : 

" If we consider the heap of an army, utterly out of all prospect 
of rising and preferment, as they certainly are, and such great things 

' Tatler, No. 5. "^ lb., No. 82. 

3 lb., Nos. 25, 26, 28, 29, 38, 39. * lb.. No. 85. 



94 ^ ADDISON. [chap. 

executed by them, it is hard to account for the motive of their gal- 
lantry. But to me, who was a cadet at the battle of Coldstream, in 
Scotland, when Monk charged at the head of the regiment now called 
Coldstream, from the victory of that day — I remember it as well as 
if it were yesterday ; I stood on the left of old West, who I believe is 
now at Chelsea — I say to me, who know very well this part of man- 
kind, I take the gallantry of private soldiers to proceed from the 
same, if not from a nobler, impulse than that of gentlemen and offi- 
cers. They have the same taste of being acceptable to their friends, 
and go through the difficulties of that profession by the same irre- 
sistible charm of fellowship and the communication of joys and sor- 
rows which quickens the relish of pleasure and abates the anguish 
of pain. Add to this that they have the same regard to fame, 
though they do not expect so great a share as men above them hope 
for ; but I will engage Serjeant Hall would die ten thousand deaths 
rather than that a word should be spoken at the Red Lettice, or any 
part of the Butcher Row, in prejudice to his courage or honesty. If 
you will have my opinion, then, of the Serjeant's letter, I pronounce 
the style to be mixed, but truly epistolary ; the sentiment relating to 
his own wound in the sublime; the postscript of Pegg Hartwell in 
the gay ; and the whole the picture of the bravest sort of men, that 
is to say, a man of great courage and small hopes." ' 

With such excellences of style and sentiment it is no 
wonder that the Tatler rapidly established itself in public 
favour. It was a novel experience for the general reader 
to be provided three times a week with entertainment 
that pleased his imagination without offending his sense 
of decency or his religious instincts. But a new hand 
shortly appeared in the Tatlei\ which was destined to 
carry the art of periodical essay-writing to a perfection 
beside which even the humour of Steele appears rude and 
unpolished. Addison and Steele had been friends since 
boyhood. They had been contemporaries at the Charter 
House, and, as we have seen, Steele had sometimes spent 
his holidays in the parsonage of Addison's father. He 
' Tadfer, No. 87. 



T.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 95 

was a postmaster at Merton about the same time that his 
friend was a Fellow of Magdalen. The admiration which 
he conceived for the hero of his boyhood lasted, as so 
often happens, through life ; he exhibited his veneration 
for him in all places, and even when Addison indulged 
his humour at his expense he showed no resentment. 
Addison, on his side, seems to have treated Steele with a 
kind of gracious condescension. The latter was one of 
the few intimate friends to whom he unbent in conver- 
sation ; and while he was Under-Secretary of State he 
aided him in the production of The Tender Husband, 
which was dedicated to him by the author. Of this play 
Steele afterwards declared with characteristic impulse that 
many of the most admired passages were the work of his 
friend, and that he " thought very meanly of himself that 
he had never publicly avowed it." 

The authorship of the Taller was at first kept secret 
to all the world. It is said .that the hand of Steele dis- 
covered itself to Addison on reading in the fifth number 
a remark which he remembered to have himself made to 
Steele on the judgment of Virgil, as shown in the appel- 
lation of "Dux Trojanus," which the Latin poet assigns 
to ^neas, when describing his adventure with Dido in 
the cave, in the place of the usual epithet of "pius" or 
" pater." Thereupon he offered his services as a con- 
tributor, and these were of course gladly accepted. The 
first paper sent by Addison to the Taller was No. 18, 
wherein is displayed that inimitable art which makes a 
man appear infinitely ridiculous by the ironical commenda- 
tion of his offences against right, reason, and good taste. 
The subject is the approaching peace with France, and it 
is noticeable that the article of foreign news, which had 
been treated in previous Tatlers with complete serious- 



96 ADDISON. [chap. 

nesp, is here for the first time invested with an air of 
pleasantry. The distress of the news-writers at the pros- 
pect of peace is thus described : 

" There is another sort of gentlemen whom I am much more con- 
cerned for, and that is the ingenious fraternity of which I have the 
honour to be an unworthy member ; I mean the news-writers of 
Great Britain, whether Post-men or Post-boys, or by what other name 
or title soever dignified or distinguished. The case of these gentle- 
men is, I think, more hard than that of the soldiers, considering that 
they have taken more towns and fought more battles. They have 
been upon parties and skirmishes when our armies have lain still, 
and given the general assault to many a place when the besiegers 
were quiet in their trenches. They have made us masters of several 
strong towns many weeks before our generals could do it, and com- 
pleted victories when our greatest captains have been glad to come 
off with a drawn battle. Where Prince Eugene has slain his thou- 
sands Boyer has slain his ten thousands. This gentleman can in- 
deed be never enough commended for his courage and intrepidity 
during this whole war : he has laid about him with an inexpressible 
fury, and, like offended Marius of ancient Rome, made such havoc 
among his countrymen as must be the work of two or three ages to 
repair. ... It is impossible for this ingenious sort of men to subsist 
after a peace: every one remembers tlie shifts they were driven to 
in the reign of King Charles the Second, when they could not furnish 
out a single paper of news without ligliting up a comet in Germany 
or a fire in Moscow. There scarce appeared a letter without a para- 
graph on an earthquake. Prodigies were grown so familiar that 
they had lost their name, as a great poet of that age has it. I re- 
member Mr. Dyer, who is justly looked upon by all the foxhunters in 
the nation as the greatest statesman our country has produced, was 
particularly famous for dealing in whales, in so much that in five 
months' time (for I had the curiosity to examine his letters on that 
occasion) he brought three into the mouth of the river Thames, be- 
sides two porpusses and a sturgeon." 

The appearance of Addison as a regular contributor to 
the Taller gradually brought about a revolution in the 



v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 97 

character of tlie paper. For some time longer, indeed, 
articles continued to be dated from the different coffee- 
houses, but only slight efforts were made to distinguish 
the materials furnished from White's, Will's, or Isaac's 
own apartment. When the hundredth number was reached 
a fresh address is given at Shere Lane, where the astrol- 
oger lived, and henceforward the papers from White's and 
Will's grow extremely rare ; those from the Grecian may 
be said to disappear ; and the foreign intelligence, dated 
from St. James', whenever it is inserted, which is seldom, 
is as often as not made the text of a literary disquisition. 
Allegories become frequent, and the letters sent, or sup- 
posed to be sent, to Isaac at his home address furnish the 
material for many numbers. The Essay, in fact, or that 
part of the newspaper which goes to form public opinion, 
preponderates greatly over that portion which is devoted 
to the report of news. Spence quotes from a Mr. Chute : 
" I have heard Sir Richard Steele say that, though he had 
a greater share in the Tatlers than in the Spectators, he 
thought the news article in the first of these was what 
contributed much to their success.'" Chute, however, 
seems to speak with a certain grudge against Addison, 
and the statement ascribed by him to Steele is intrinsi- 
cally improbable. It is not very likely that, as the propri- 
etor of the Tatler, he would have dispensed with any ele- 
ment in it that contributed to its popularity, yet after 
No. 100 the news articles are seldom found. The truth is 
that Steele recognised the superiority of Addison's style, 
and with his usual quickness accommodated the form of 
his journal to the genius of the new contributor. 

" I have only one gentleman," says he, in the preface to the Toiler, 

^ Spence's Anecdotes, p. 325. 



98 ADDISON. [chap. 

" who will be nameless, to thank for any frequent assistance to me, 
which indeed it would have been barbarous in him to have denied to 
one with whom he has lived in intimacy from childhood, considering 
the great ease with which he is able to despatch the most entertain- 
ing pieces of this nature. This good office he pei'formed with such 
force of genius, humour, wit, and learning that I fared like a dis- 
tressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid ; I was 
undone by my own auxiliary ; when I had once called him in I could 
not subsist without dependence on him." 

With his usual enthusiastic generosity, Steele, in this 
passage, unduly depreciates his own merits to exalt the 
genius of his friend. A comparison of the amount of 
material furnished to the Tatler by Addison and Steele 
respectively shows that out of 271 numbers the latter con- 
tributed 188 and the former only 42. Nor is the dispar- 
ity in quantity entirely balanced by the superior quality 
of Addison's papers. Though it was, doubtless, his fine 
workmanship and admirable method which carried to per- 
fection the style of writing initiated in the Tatler, yet 
there is scarcely a department of essay-writing developed 
in the Spectator which does not trace its origin to Steele. 
It is Steele who first ventures to raise his voice against 
the prevailing dramatic taste of the age on behalf of the 
superior morality and art of Shakespeare's plays. 

" Of all men living," says he, in the eighth Tatler, " I pity players 
(who must be men of good understanding to be capable of being 
such) that they are obliged to repeat and assume proper gestures 
for representing things of which their reason must be ashamed, and 
which they must disdain their audience for approving. The amend- 
ment of these low gratifications is only to be made by people of con- 
dition, by encouraging the noble representation of the noble charac- 
ters drawn by Shakespeare and others, from whence it is impossible 
to return without strong impressions of honour and humanity. On 
these occasions distress is laid before us with all its causes and con- 
sequences, and our resentment placed according to the merit of the 



v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 99 

person afflicted. Were dramas of this nature more acceptable to 
the taste of the town, men who have genius would bend their stud- 
ies to excel in them." 

Steele, too, it was who attacked, with all the vigour of 
which he was capable, the fashionable vice of gambling. 
So severe were his comments on this subject in the Tatler 
that he raised against himself the fierce resentment of the 
whole community of sharpers, though he was fortunate 
enough at the same time to enlist the sympathies of the 
better part of society. " Lord Forbes," says Mr. Nichols, 
the antiquary, in his notes to the Tatler, " happened to be 
in company with the two military gentlemen just men- 
tioned" (Major-General Davenport and Brigadier Bisset) 
"in St. James' Coffee -House when two or three well- 
dressed men, all unknown to his lordship or his company, 
came into the room, and in a public, outrageous manner 
abused Captain Steele as the author of the Tatler. One 
of them, with great audacity and vehemence, swore that 
he would cut Steele's throat or teach him better manners. 
'In this country,' said Lord Forbes, 'you will find it easier 
to cut a purse than to cut a throat.' His brother officers 
instantly joined with his lordship and turned the cut- 
throats out of the coffee-house with every mark of dis- 
grace." ' 

The practice of duelling, also, which had hitherto passed 
unreproved, was censured by Steele in a series of papers 
in the Tatler, which seemed to have been written on an 
occasion when, having been forced to fight much against 
his will, he had the misfortune dangerously to wound his 
antagonist.'' The sketches of character studied from life, 
and the letters from fictitious correspondents, both of 

• Tatler, vol. iv. p. 545 (Nichols' edition). 
2 See p. 93, note 3. 
5* 



100 ADDISON. [chap. 

which form so noticeable a feature in the Spectator, ap- 
pear roughly, but yet distinctly, drafted in the Tatler. 
Even the papers of literary criticism, afterwards so fully 
elaborated by Addison, are anticipated by his friend, who 
may fairly claim the honour to have been the first to 
speak with adequate respect of the genius of Milton.' 
In a word, whatever was perfected by Addison was begun 
by Steele ; if the one has for ever associated his name 
with the S2)ectator, the other may justly appropriate the 
credit of the Tatler, a work which bears to its successor 
the same kind of relation that the frescoes of Masaccio 
bear, in point of dramatic feeling and style, to those of 
Raphael ; the later productions deserving honour for fin- 
ish of execution, the earlier for priority of invention. 

The Tatler was published till the 2d of January, I7l0- 
11, and was discontinued, according to Steele's own ac- 
count, because the public had penetrated his disguise, and 
he was therefore no longer able to preach with effect in 
the person of Bickerstaff. - It may be doubted whether 
this was his real motive for abandoning the paper. He 
had been long known as its conductor; and that bis read- 
ers had shown no disinclination to listen to him is proved, 
not only by the large circulation of each number of the 
Tatler, but by the extensive sale of the successive volumes 
of the collected papers at the high price of a guinea apiece, 
He was, in all probability, led to drop the publication by 
finding that the political element that the paper contained 
was a source of embarrassment to him. His sympathies 
were vehemently Whig ; the Tatler from the beginning 
had celebrated the virtues of Marlborough and his friends, 
both directly and under cover of fiction ; and he had been 
rewarded for his services with a commissionership of the 
' Tatler, No. 6. 



Y.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 101 

Stamp-office. When the Whig Ministry fell in 1710, Har- 
ley, setting a just value on the abilities of Steele, left hira 
in the enjoyment of his office and expressed his desire to 
serve him in any other way. Under these circumstances, 
Steele no doubt felt it incumbent on him to discontinue a 
paper which, both from its design and its traditions, would 
have tempted him into the expression of his political par- 
tialities. 

For two months, therefore, " the censorship of Great 
Britain," as he himself expressed it, " remained in commis- 
sion," until Addison and he once more returned to dis- 
charge the duties of the office in the Spectator, the first 
number of which was published on the 1st of March, 
1710-11. The Tatler had only been issued three times a 
week, but the conductors of the new paper were now so 
confident in their own resources and in the favour of the 
public that they undertook to bring out one number daily. 
The new paper at once exhibited the impress of Addison's 
genius, which had gradually transformed the character of 
the Tatler itself. The latter was originally, in every sense 
of the word, a newspaper, but the Spectator from the first 
indulged his humour at the expense of the clubs of Quid- 



" There is," says he, " another set of men that I must likewise lay 
a claim to as being altogether unfurnished with ideas till the busi- 
ness and conversation of the day has supplied them. I have often 
considered these poor souls with an eye of great commiseration when 
I have heard them asking the first man they have met with whether 
there was any news stirring, and by that means gathering together 
materials for thinking. These needy persons do not know what to 
talk of till about twelve o'clock in the morning ; for by that time 
they are pretty good Judges of the weather, know which way the 
wind sets, and whether the Dutch mail be come in. As they lie at 
the mercy of the first man they meet, and are grave or impertinent 



102 ADDISON. [chap. 

all the day long, according to the notions which they have imbibed 
in the morning, I would earnestly entreat them not to stir out of 
their chambers till they have read this paper ; and do promise them 
that I will daily instil into them such sound and wholesome senti- 
ments as shall have a good effect on their conversation for the en- 
suing twelve hours." ^ 

For these, and other men of leisure, a kind of paper 
differing from the Tatler, which proposed only to retail 
the various species of gossip in the coffee-houses, was re- 
quired, and the new entertainment was provided by the 
original design of an imaginary club, consisting of several 
ideal types of character grouped round the central figure 
of the Spectator. They represent considerable classes or 
sections of the community, and are, as a rule, men of 
strongly marked opinions, prejudices, and foibles, which 
furnish inexhaustible matter of comment to the Spectator 
himself, who delivers the judgments of reason and com- 
mon-sense. Sir Roger de Coverley, with his simplicity, 
his high sense of honour, and his old-world reminiscences, 
reflects the country gentleman of the best kind ; Sir An- 
drew Freeport expresses the opinions of the enterprising, 
hard-headed, and rather hard-hearted moneyed interest ; 
Captain Sentry speaks for the army ; the Templar for the 
world of taste and learning; the clergyman for theology 
and philosophy ; while AVill Honeycomb, the elderly man 
of fashion, gives the Spectator many opportunities for crit- 
icising the traditions of morality and breeding surviving 
from the days of the Eestoration. Thus, instead of the 
division of places which determined the arrangement of 
the Tatler, the different subjects treated in the Spectator 
are distributed among a variety of persons: the Templar 
is substituted for the Grecian Coffee-House and AVill's ; 
' Spectator, No. 10. 



v] TEE TA TIER AKD SPECTATOR 103 

Will Honeycomb takes the place of White's; and Captain 
Sentry, whose appearances are rare, stands fur the more 
voluminous article on foreign intelligence published in the 
old periodical, under the head of St. James's. The Spec- 
tator himself finds a natural prototype in Isaac Bickerstaflf, 
but his character is drawn with a far greater finish and 
delicacy, and is much more essential to the design of the 
paper which he conducts, than was that of the old astrol- 
oger. 

y The aim of the Spectator was to establish a rational 
standard of conduct in morals, manners, art, and literature. 

" Since," says he in one of his early numbers, " I have raised to 
myself so great an audience, I shall spare no pains to make their in- 
struction agreeable and their diversion useful. For which reason I 
shall endeavour to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with 
morality, that my readers may, if possible, both ways find their ac- 
count in the speculation of the day. And to the end that their virtue 
and discretion may not be short, transient, intermitting starts of 
thought, I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day 
till I have recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and 
folly into which the age has fallen. The mind that lies fallow but a 
single day sprouts up in follies that are only to be killed by a con- 
stant and assiduous culture. It was said of Socrates that he brought 
Philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among men ; and I shall 
be ambitious to have it said of me that I have brought Philosophy 
out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs 
and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." ' 

Johnson, in his Life of Addison, says that the task un- 
dertaken in the S^jectator was "first attempted by Casa in 
his book oi Manners, and Castiglione in his Courtier; two 
books yet celebrated in Italy for purity and elegance, 
and which, if they are now less read, are neglected only 
because they have effected that reformation which their 
' Spectator, Xo. 1 0. 



104 ADDISON. [chap. 

authors intended, and their precepts now are no longer 
wanted." He afterwards praises the Tatler and Spectator 
by saying that they "adjusted, like Casa, the unsettled 
practice of daily intercourse by propriety and politeness, 
and, like La Bruyere, exhibited the characters and man- 
ners of the age." This commendation scarcely does jus- 
tice to the work of Addison and Steele. Casa, a man 
equally distinguished for profligacy and politeness, merely 
codified in his Galateo the laws of good manners which 
prevailed in his age. He is the Lord Chesterfield of Italy. 
Castiglione gives instructions to the young courtier how 
to behave in such a manner as to make himself agreeable 
to his prince. La Bruyere's characters are no doubt the 
literary models, of those which appear in the Spectator. 
But La Bruyere merely described what he saw, with ad- 
mirable wit, urbanity, and scholarship, but without any of 
the earnestness of a moral reformer. Jle could never have 
conceived the character of Sir Roger de Coverley ; and, 
though he was ready enough to satirise the follies of so- 
ciety as an observer from the outside, to bring " philoso- 
phy out of closets and libraries, to dwell in clubs and as- 
semblies," was far from being his ambition. He would 
probably have thought the publication of a. newspaper 
scarcely consistent with his position as a gerjjLleman. 

A very lai-ge portion of the Spectator is devoted to re- 
flections on the manners of women. Addison saw clearly 
how important a part the female sex was destined to play 
in the formation of English taste and manners. Removed 
from the pedestal of enthusiastic devotion on which they 
had been placed during the feudal ages, women were treated 
under the Restoration as mere playthings and luxuries. 
As manners became more decent they found themselves 
secured in their emancipated position but destitute of se- 



v.] TW£. TATLER A^T) SPECTATOR. 105 

rious and rational employment. It was Addison's object, 
therefore, to enlist the aid of female genius in softening, 
refining, and moderating the gross and conflicting tastes 
of a half -civilised society. 

" There are none," he says, " to whom this paper will be more 
useful than to the female world. I have often thought there has 
not been sufficient pains taken in finding out proper employments 
and diversions for the fair ones. Their amusements seem contrived 
for them, rather as they are women than as they are reasonable 
creatures, and are more adapted to the sex than to the species. The 
toilet is" their great scene of business, and the right adjustment of 
their hair the principal employment of their lives. The sorting of 
a suit of ribands is reckoned a very good morning's work ; and if 
they make an excursion to a mercer's or a toy shop, so great a fa- 
tigue makes them unfit for anything else all the day after. Their 
more serious occupations are sewing and embroidery, and their great- 
est drudgery the preparations of jellies and sweetmeats. This, I say, 
is the state of ordinary women, though I know there are multitudes 
of those of a more elevated life and conversation that move in %n 
exalted sphere of knowledge and virtue, that join all the beauties 
of the mind to the ornaments of dress, and inspire a kind of awe and 
respect, as well as of love, into their male beholders. I hope to in- 
crease the number of these by publishing this daily paper, which I 
ehall always endeavour to make an innocent, if not an improving 
entertainment, and by that means, at least, divert the minds of my 
female readers from greater trifles." ^ 

To some of the vigorous spirits of the age the mild and 
social character of the Sjiectator'' s satire did not commend 
itself. Swift, who had contributed several papers to the 
Taller while it was in its infancy, found it too feminine 
for his taste. " I will not meddle with the Spectator^'' 
says he in his Journal to Stella, " let him fair sex it to 
the world's end." Personal pique, however, may have 
done as much as a differing taste to depreciate the S2)ec- 
* Spectator, No. 10. 



106 ADDISON. [chap. 

tator in the eyes of the author of the Tale of a Tub, for 
he elsewhere acknowledges its merits. " The Spectator,^'' 
he writes to Stella, " is written by Steele, with Addison's 
help ; it is often very pretty .... But I never see him 
(Steele) or Addison." That part of the public to whom 
the paper was specially addressed read it with keen relish. 
In the ninety-second number a correspondent, signing her- 
self " Leonora," ' writes : 

" Mr. Spectator, — Your paper is a part of my tea-equipage ; and 
my servant iinows my humour so well that, calling for my breakfast 
this morning (it being past my usual hour), she answered, the Spec- 
tator was not yet come in, but the tea-kettle boiled, and she expected 
it every moment." 

In a subsequent number "Thomas Trusty" writes: 

" I constantly peruse your paper as I smoke my morning's pipe 
(though I can't forbear reading the motto before 1 fill and light), and 
really it gives a grateful relish to every whiff ; each paragraph is 
fraught either with useful or delightful notions, and I never fail of 
being highly diverted or improved. The variety of your subjects 
surprises me as much as a box of pictures did formerly, in which 
there was only one face, that by pulling some pieces of isinglass 
over it was changed into a grave senator or a merry-andrew, a pol- 
ished lady or a nun, a beau or a blackamoor, a prude or a coquette, 
a country squire or a conjuror, with many other different represen- 
tations very entertaining (as you are), though still the same at the 
bottom." ^ 

The Spectator was read in all parts of the country. 

" I must confess," says Addison, as his task was drawing to an 
end, " that I am not a little gratified and obliged by that concern 
which appears in this great city upon my present design of laying 
down this paper. It is likewise with much satisfaction that I find 
some of the most outlying parts of the kingdom alarmed upon this 

' The writer was a Miss Shepherd. 
2 Spectator, 'So. 134. 



T.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 107 

occasion, having received letters to expostulate with me about it 
from several of my readers of the remotest boroughs of Great Brit- 
ain." 1 

With how keen an interest the public entered into the 
humour of the paper is shown by the following letter, signed 
" Philo-Spec :" 

"I was this morning in a company of your well-wishers, when we 
read over, with great satisfaction, TuUy's observations on action ad- 
apted to the British theatre, though, by the way, we were very sorry 
to find that you have disposed of another member of your club. Poor 
Sir Roger is dead, and the worthy clergyman dying; Captain Sentry 
has taken possession of a fair estate ; Will Honeycomb has married 
a farmer's daughter; and the Templar withdraws himself into the 
business of his own profession." ^ 

It is no wonder that readers anticipated with regret the 
dissolution of a society that had provided them with so 
much delicate entertainment. Admirably as the club was 
designed for maintaining that variety of treatment on which 
Mr. Trusty comments in the letter quoted above, the exe- 
cution of the design is deserving of even greater admira- 
tion. The skill with which the grave speculations of the 
Spectator are contrasted with the lively observations of Will 
Honeycomb on the fashions of the age, and these again are 
diversified with papers descriptive of character or adorned 
with fiction, while the letters from the public outside form 
a running commentary on the conduct of the paper, cannot 
be justly appreciated without a certain effort of thought. 
But it may safely be said that, to have provided society 
day after day, for more than two years, with a species of 
entertainment which, nearly two centuries later, retains all 
its old power to interest and delight, is an achievement 
unique in the history of literature. Even apart from the 
exquisite art displayed in their grouping, the matter of many 
• Spectator, No. 553. '■' Ibid., No. 542. 



108 ADDISON. [chap. 

of tlie essays in the Spectator is still valuable. The vivid 
descriptions of contemporary manners, the inimitable series 
of sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley, the criticisms in the 
papers on True and False Wit and Milton's Paradise Lost, 
have scarcely less significance for ourselves than for the so- 
ciety for which they were immediately written. 

Addison's own papers were 274 in number, as against 236 
contributed by Steele. They were, as a rule, signed with 
one of the four letters C. L. I. 0., either because, as Tickell 
seems to hint in bis Elegy, they composed the name of one 
of the Muses, or, as later scholars have conjectured, because 
they were respectively written from four different localities 
— viz., Chelsea, London, Islington, and the Office. 

The sale of the Si^ectator was doubtless very large rela- 
tively to the number of readers in Queen Anne's reign. 
Johnson, indeed, computes the number sold daily to have 
been only sixteen hundred and eighty, but he seems to have 
overlooked what Addison himself says on the subject very 
shortly after the paper had been started : " My publisher tells 
me that there are already three thousand of them distrib- 
uted every day." ' This number must have gone on increas- 
ing with the growing reputation of the Spectator. When 
the Preface of the Four Sermo7is of Dr. Fleetwood, Bishop 
of Llandaff, was suppressed by order of the House of Com- 
mons, the Spectator printed it in its 384th number, thus con- 
veying, as the Bishop said in a letter to Burnet, Bishop of 
Salisbury, "fourteen thousand copies of the condemned 
preface into people's hands that would otherwise have never 
seen or heard of it." Making allowance for the extraor- 
dinary character of the number, it is not unreasonable to 
conclude that the usual daily issue of the Spectator to 
readers in all parts of the kingdom would, towards the close 
of its career, have reached ten thousand copies. The sep- 
» Spectator, No. 10. 



v.] THE TATLER AND SPECTATOR. 109 

arate papers were afterwards collected into octavo volumes, 
which were sold, like the volumes of the Taller, for a guinea 
apiece. Steele tells us that more than nine thousand copies 
of each volume were sold off/ 

Nothing could have been better timed than the appear- 
ance of the Spectator ; it may indeed be doubted whether 
it could have been produced with success at any' other pe- 
riod. Had it been projected earlier, while Addison was 
still in office, his thoughts would have been diverted to other 
subjects, and he would have been unlikely to survey the 
world with quite impartial eyes ; had the publication been 
delayed it would have come before the public when the 
balance of all minds was disturbed by the dangers of the 
political situation. The diflSculty of preserving neutrality 
under such circumstances was soon shown by the fate of 
the Guardian. Shortly after the Spectator was discontin- 
ued this new paper was designed by the fertile invention 
of Steele, with every intention of keeping it, like its pred- 
ecessor, free from the entanglements of party. But it had 
not proceeded beyond the forty -first number when the 
vehement partizanship of Steele was excited by the Tory 
Examiner ; in the 128th number appeared a letter, signed 
"An English Tory," calling for the demolition of Dunkirk, 
while soon afterwards, finding that his political feelings 
were hampered by the design on which the Guardian was 
conducted, he dropped it and replaced it with a paper called 
the Englishman. Addison himself, who had been a frequent 
contributor to the Guardian, did not aid in the Englishman, 
of the violent party tone of which he strongly disapproved. 
A few years afterwards the old friends and coadjutors in 
the Tatler and Spectator found themselves maintaining an 
angry controversy in the opposing pages of the Old Whig 

and the Plebeian. 

' Spectator, No. 555. 



CHAPTER VI. 

CATO. 

It is a peculiarity in Addison's life that Fortune, as if con- 
spiring with the happiness of his genius, constantly fur- 
nished him with favourable opportunities for the exercise 
of his powers. The pension granted him by Halifax en- 
abled him, while he was yet a young man, to add to his 
knowledge of classical literature an intimate acquaintance 
with the languages and governments of the chief European 
states. When his fortunes were at the lowest ebb on his 
return from bis travels, his introduction to Godolphin by 
Halifax, the consequence of which was The Campaign, pro- 
cured him at once celebrity and advancement. The ap- 
pearance of the Tatler, though due entirely to the inven- 
tion of Steele, prepared the way for /d'evelopment of the 
genius that prevailed in the Spectato?'. But the climax of 
Addison's good fortune was certainly the successful pro- 
duction of Cato, a play which, on its own merits, might 
have been read with interest by the scholars of the time, 
but which could scarcely have succeeded on the stage if it 
had not been appropriated and made part of our national 
life by the violence of political passion. 

Addison had not the genius of a dramatist. The grace, 
the irony, the fastidious refinement which give him such 
an unrivalled capacity in describing and criticising the hu- 



CHAP. VI.] CATO. Ill 

monrs of men as a spectator did not qualify bira for imag- 
inative sympathy with their actions and passions. But, 
like most men of ability in that period, bis thoughts were 
drawn towards the stage, and even in Dryden's lifetime he 
had sent bira a play in manuscript, asking him to use bis 
interest to obtain its performance. The old poet returned 
it, we are told, " with many commendations, but with an 
expression of his opinion that on the stage it would not 
meet with its deserved success." Addison, nevertheless, 
persevered in his attempts, and during his travels he wrote 
four acts of the tragedy of Cato, the design of which, ac- 
cording to Tickell, he bad formed while be was at Oxford, 
though he certainly borrowed many incidents in the play 
from a tragedy on the same subject which be saw per- 
formed at Venice.' It is characteristic, however, of the 
undramatic mood in which be executed bis task that the 
last act was not written till shortly before the performance 
of the play, many years later. As early as 1703 the drama 
was shown to Gibber by Steele, who said that " whatever 
spirit Mr. Addison bad shown in bis writing it, be doubted 
that he would ever have courage enough to let bis Cato 
stand the censure of an English audience ; that it had only 
been the amusement of his leisure hours in Italy, and was 
never intended for the stage." He seems to have remained 
of the same opinion on the very eve of the performance of 
the play. " When Mr. Addison," says Pope, as reported 
by Spence, "had finished bis Cato be brought it to me, 
desired to have my sincere opinion of it, and left it with 
me for three or four days. I gave him my opinion of it 
sincerely, which was, ' that I thought be bad better not act 
it, and that be would get reputation enough by only print- 
ing it.' This I said as thinking the lines well written, but 
' See Addison's Works (Tickell's edition), vol. v. p. 187. 



112 ADDISON. [chap. 

the piece not theatrical enough. Some time after Mr. Ad- 
dison said 'that his own opinion was the same with mine, 
but that some particular friends of his, whom he could not 
disoblige, insisted on its being acted.' " ' 

Undoubtedly, Pope was right in principle, and anybody 
who reads the thirty-ninth paper in the S2Jectator may see 
not only that Addison was out of sympathy with the tra- 
ditions of the English stage, but that his whole turn of 
thought disqualified him from comprehending the motives 
of dramatic composition. " The modern drama," says he, 
" excels that of Greece and Rome in the intricacy and dis- 
position of the fable — but, what a Christian writer would 
be ashamed to own, falls infinitely short of it in the moral 
part of the performance." And the entire drift of the crit- 
icism that follows relates to the thought, the sentiment, 
and the expression of the modern drama, rather than to 
the really essential question, the nature of the action. It 
is false criticism to say that the greatest dramas of Shake- 
speare fail in morality as compared with those of the Greek 
tragedians. That the manner in which the moral is con- 
veyed is different in each case is of course true, since the 
subjects of Greek tragedy were selected from Greek my- 
thology, and were treated by ^schylus and Sophocles, at 
all events, in a religious spirit, whereas the plays of Shake- 
speare are only indirectly Christian, and produce their ef- 
fect by an appeal to the individual conscience. None the 
less is it the case that 3Iacbeth, Hamlet, and Lear have 
for modern audiences a far deeper moral meaning than the 
Agamemnon or the CEdipiis Tyrannus. The tragic motive 
in Greek tragedy is the impotence of man in the face of 
moral law or necessity ; in Shakespeare's tragedies it is the 
corruption of the will, some sin of the individual against 
1 Spence's Anecdotes, p. 196. 



VI.] CATO. 113 

the law of God, which brings its own punisljinent. There 
was nothing in tliis principle of which a Cliristian drama- 
tist need have been ashamed ; and as regards Shakespeare, 
at any rate, it is evident that Addison's criticism is unjust. 
It is, however, by no means undeserved in its applica- 
tion to the class of plays which grew up after the Resto- 
ration, Under that regime the moral spirit of the Shake- 
sperian drama entirely disappears. The king, whose tem- 
per was averse to tragedy, and whose taste had been formed 
on French models, desired to see every play end happily, 
" I am going to end a piece," writes Roger, Earl of Orrery, 
to a friend, " in the French style, because I have heard the 
King declare that he preferred their manner to our own," 
The greatest tragedies of the Elizabethan age were trans- 
formed to suit this new fashion ; even King Lear obtained 
a happy deliverance from his sufferings in satisfaction of 
the requirements of an effeminate Court. Addison very 
■wittily ridicules this false taste in the fortieth number of 
the Spectator. He is not less felicitous in his remarks on 
the sentiments and the style of the Caroline drama, though 
he does not sufficiently discriminate his censure, which he 
bestows equally on the dramatists of the Restoration and 
on Shakespeare. Two main characteristics appear in all 
the productions of the former epoch — the monarchical 
spirit and the fashion of gallantry. The names of the 
plays speak for themselves : on the one hand. The Indian 
Emperor, Aurengzebe, The Indian Queen, The Conquest 
of Granada, The Fate of Hannibal ; on the other. Secret 
Love, Tyrannic Love, Love and Vengeance, The Rival 
Queens, Theodosius, or the Power of Love, and number- 
less others of the same kind. In the one set of dramas 
the poet sought to arouse the passion of pity by exhibit- 
ing the downfall of persons of high estate ; in the other 



IH ADDISON. [chap. 

he appealed to the sentiment of romantic passion. Such 
were the fruits of that taste for French romance which 
was encouraged by Charles II., and which sought to dis- 
guise the absence of genuine emotion by the turgid bom- 
bast of its sentiment and the epigrammatic declamation of 
its rhymed verse. 

At the same time, the taste of the nation having been 
once turned into French channels, a remedy for these de- 
fects was naturally sought for from French sources ; and 
just as the school of Racine and Boileau set its face against 
the extravagances of the romantic coteries, so Addison and 
his English followers, adopting the principles of the French 
classicists, applied them to the reformation of the English 
theatre. Hence arose a great revival of respect for the po- 
etical doctrines of Aristotle, regard for the unities of time 
and place, attention to the proprieties of sentiment and 
diction — in a word, for all those characteristics of style 
afterwards summed up in the phrase " correctness." 

This habit of thought, useful as an antidote to extrava- 
gance, was not fertile as a motive of dramatic production. 
Addison worked with strict and conscious attention to 
his critical principles : the consequence is that his Cato, 
though superficially " correct," is a passionless and me- 
chanical play. He had combated with reason the " ridic- 
ulous doctrine in modern criticism, that writers of trag- 
edy are obliged to an equal distribution of rewards and 
punishments, and an impartial execution of poetical jus- 
tice." ' But his reasoning led him on to deny that the 
idea of justice is an essential element in tragedy. " We 
find," says he, *' that good and evil happen alike to all 
men on this side the grave ; and, as the principal design 
of tragedy is to raise commiseration and terror in the 
' Spectator, No. 40. 



Ti.] CATO. 115 

minds of the audience, we shall defeat this great end if 
we always make virtue and innocence happy and success- 
ful. . . . The ancient writers of tragedy treated men in 
their plays as they are dealt with in the world, by making 
virtue sometimes happy and sometimes miserable, as they 
found it in the fable which they made choice of, or as it 
might affect their audience in the most agreeable man- 
ner." * But it is certain that the fable which the two 
greatest of the Greek tragedians "made choice of" was 
always of a religious nature, and that the idea of Justice 
was never absent from it ; it is also certain that Retribu- 
tion is a vital element in all the tragedies of Shakespeare. 
The notion that the essence of tragedy consists in the spec- 
tacle of a good man struggling with adversity is a concep- 
tion derived through the French from the Roman Stoics ; 
it is not found in the works of the greatest tragic poets. 

This, however, was Addison's central motive, and this is 
what Pope, in his famous Prologue, assigns to him as his 
chief praise : 

" Our author shuns by vulgar springs to move 
The hero's glory or the virgin's love ; 
In pitying love we but our weakness show, 
And wild ambition well deserves its woe. 
Here tears shall flow from a more generous cause, 
Such tears as patriots shed for dying laws : 
He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise, 
And calls forth Roman drops from British eyes. 
Virtue confessed in human shape he draws — 
What Plato thought, and godlike Cato was : 
No common object to your sight displays, 
But what with pleasure heav'n itself surveys ; 
A brave man struggling in the storms of fate, 
And greatly falling with a falling state." 

' Spectator, No. 40. 



116 ADDISON. [chap. 

A falling state offers a tragic spectacle to the thouglit 
and the reason, but not one that can be represented on 
the stage so as to move the passions of the spectators. 
The character of Cato, as exhibited by Addison, is an 
abstraction, round which a number of other lay figures 
are skilfully grouped for the delivery of lofty and appro- 
priate sentiments. Juba, the virtuous young prince of 
Nuraidia, the admirer of Cato's virtue, Fortius and Mar- 
cus, Cato's virtuous sons, and Marcia, his virtuous daugh- 
ter, are all equally admirable and equally lifeless. John- 
son's criticism of the play leaves little to be said : 

"About things," he observes, " on which the public thinlis long 
it commonly attains to think right ; and of Cato it has not been un- 
justly determined that it is rather a poem in dialogue than a drama, 
rather a succession of just sentiments in elegant language than a 
representation of natural affections, or of any state probable or pos- 
sible in human life. Nothing here ' excites or assuages emotion ;' 
here is 'no magical power of raising fantastic terror or wild anxiety.' 
The events are expected without solicitude, and are remembered with- 
out joy or sorrow. Of the agents we have no care ; we consider not 
what they are doing or what they are suffering; we wish only to 
know what they have to say. Cato is a being above our solicitude ; 
a man of whom the gods take care, and whom we leave to their care 
with heedless confidence. To the rest neither gods nor men can have 
much attention, for there is not one among them that strongly at- 
tracts either affection or esteem. But they are made the vehicles 
of such sentiments and such expressions that there is scarcely a 
scene in the play which the reader does not wish to impress upon 
his memory." 

To this it may be added that, from the essentially 
undramatic bent of Addison's genius, whenever he con- 
trives a train of incident he manages to make it a little 
absurd. Dennis has pointed out with considerable hu- 
mour the consequences of his conscientious adherence to 
the unity of place, whereby every species of action in the 



Ti.] CATO. Ill 

play — love-making, conspiracy, debating, and fighting — 
is made to take place in the " large hall in the govern- 
or's palace of Utica." It is strange that Addison's keen 
sense of the ridiculous, which inspired so happily his criti- 
cisms on the allegorical paintings at Versailles,' should 
not have shown him the incongruities which Dennis dis- 
cerned ; but, in truth, they pervade the atmosphere of the 
whole play. All the actors — the distracted lovers, the 
good young man, Juba, and the blundering conspirator, 
Sempronius — seem to be oppressed with an uneasy con- 
sciousness that they have a character to sustain, and are 
not confident of coming up to what is expected of them. 
This is especially the case with Fortius, a pragmatic young 
Roman, whose praiseworthy but futile attempts to unite 
the qualities of Stoical fortitude, romantic passion, and 
fraternal loyalty, exhibit him in a position of almost comic 
embarrassment. According to Pope, " the love part was 
flung in after, to comply with the popular taste ;" but the 
removal of these scenes would make the play so remark- 
ably barren of incident that it is a little difficult to credit 
the statement. 

The deficiencies of Cato as an acting play were, however, 
more than counterbalanced by the violence of party spirit, 
which insisted on investing the comparatively tame senti- 
ments assigned to the Roman champions of liberty with a 
pointed modern application. In 1713 tire rage of the con- 
tending factions was at its highest point. The Tories were 
suspected, not without reason, of designs against the Act 
of Settlement ; the Whigs, on the other hand, were still 
suffering in public opinion from the charge of having, for 
their own advantage, protracted the war with Louis XIV. 
Marlborough had been accused in 1711 of receiving bribes 
• See p. 43. 



118 ADDISON. [chap. 

while commander-in-chief, and had been dismissed from all 
his employments. Disappointment, envy, revenge, and no 
doubt a genuine apprehension for the public safety, inspired 
the attacks of the Whigs upon their rivals ; and when it was 
known that Addison had in his drawers an unfinished play 
on so promising a subject as Cato, great pressure was 
put upon him by his friends to complete it for the stage. 
Somewhat unwillingly, apparently, he roused himself to 
the task. So small, indeed, was his inclination for it, that 
he is said in the first instance to have asked Hughes, after- 
wards author of the Sieffe of Damascus, to write a fifth act 
for him. Hughes undertook to do so, but on returning a 
few days afterwards with his own performance, he found 
that Addison had himself finished the play. In spite of 
the judgment of the critics, Cato was quickly hurried oflE 
for rehearsal, doubtless with many fears on the part of the 
author. His anxieties during this period must have been 
great " I was this morning," writes Swift to Stella on 
the 6th of April, " at ten, at the rehearsal of Mr. Addison's 
play, called Cato, which is to be acted on Friday. There 
was not half a score of us to see it. We stood on the 
stage, and it was foolish enough to see the actors prompt- 
ed every moment, and the poet directing them, and the 
drab that acts Cato's daughter (Mrs. Oldfield) out in the 
midst of a passionate part, and then calling out, 'What's 
next ?' " 

Mrs. Oldfield not only occasionally forgot the poet's text, 
she also criticised it. She seems to have objected to the 
original draft of a speech of Fortius in the second scene of 
the third act ; and Pope, whose advice Addison appears to 
have frequently asked, suggested the present reading : 

" Fixt in astonishment, I gaze upon thee 
Like one just blasted by a stroke from heaven 



VI.] CATO. 119 

Who pants for breath, and stiffens, yet alive, 
In dreadful looks : a monument of wrath." ' 

Pope also proposed the alteration of the last line in the 
play from 

" And oh, 'twas this that ended Cato's life," 
to 

" And robs the guilty world of Cato's life ;" 

and he was generally the cause of many modifications. " I 
believe," said he to Spence, " Mr. Addison did not leave a 
word unchanged that I objected to in his CatoP " 

On the 13th of April the play was ready for performance, 
and contemporary accounts give a vivid picture of the eager- 
ness of the public, the excitement of parties, and the ap- 
prehensions of the author. " On our first night of acting 
it," says Gibber, in his Apology, speaking of the subsequent 
representation at Oxford, " our house was, in a manner, in- 
vested, and entrance demanded by twelve o'clock at noon; 
and before one it was not wide enough for many who came 
too late for their places. The same crowds continued for 
three days together — an uncommon curiosity in that place ; 
and the death of Cato triumphed over the injuries of Caesar 
everywhere." The prologue — a very fine one — was con- 
tributed by Pope ; the epilogue — written, according to the 
execrable taste fashionable after the Restoration, in a comic 
vein — by Garth. As to the performance itself, a very lively 
record of the effect it produced remains in Pope's letter to 
Trumbull of the 30th April, 1713: 

" Cato was not so much the wonder of Rome in his days as he is 
of Britain in ours ; and though all the foolish industry possible had 
been used to make it thought a party play, yet what the author 

' Spence's Anecdotes, p. 151. ' lUd. 



120 ADDISON. [chat. 

said of another may the most properly be applied to him on this 
occasion : 

'Envy itself Is dumb, in wonder lost, 
And factious strive who shall applaud him most !' * 

The numerous and violent claps of the Whig party on the one side 
of the theatre were echoed back by the Tories on the other, while 
the author sweated behind the scenes with concern to find their ap- 
plause proceeding more from the hand than the head. This was the 
case, too, with the Prologue-writer, who was clapped into a staunch 
Whig at the end of evei-y two lines. I believe you have heard that, 
after all the applauses of the opposite faction, my Lord Bolingbroke 
sent for Booth, who played Cato, into the box, between one of the 
acts, and presented him with fifty guineas, in acknowledgment, as he 
expressed it, for defending the cause of liberty so well against a per- 
petual dictator. The Whigs are unwilling to be distanced this way, 
and therefore design a present to the same Cato very speedily ; in 
the meantime they are getting ready as good a sentence as the former 
on their side ; so betwixt them it is probable that Cato (as Dr. Garth 
expressed it) may have something to live upon after he dies." 

The Queen herself partook, or feigned to partake, of the 
general entliusiasra, and expressed a wish that the play should 
be dedicated to her. This honour had, however, been al- 
ready designed by the poet for the Duchess of Marlborough, 
so that, finding himself unable under the circumstances to 
fulfil his intentions, he decided to leave the play without 
any dedication. Cato ran for the then unprecedented period 
of thirty-five nights. Addison appears to have behaved 
with great liberality to the actors, and, at Oxford, to have 
handed over to them all the profits of the first night's per- 
formance; while they in return. Gibber tells us, thought 
themselves " obliged to spare no pains in the proper deco- 
rations " of the piece. 

The fame of Cato spread from England to the Continent. 
It was twice translated into Italian, twice into French, and 
■ These lines are to be found in The Campaign, see p. 66. 



VI.] CATO. 121 

once into Latin ; a French and a German imitation of it 
were also published. Voltaire, to whom Shakespeare ap- 
peared no better than an inspired barbarian, praises it in 
the highest terras. " The first English writer who com- 
posed a regular tragedy and infused a spirit of elegance 
through every part of it was," says he, " the illustrious Mr. 
Addison. His Cato is a masterpiece, both with regard to 
the diction and the harmony and beauty of the numbers. 
The character of Cato is, in my opinion, greatly superior 
to that of Cornelia in the PomjHy of Corneille, for Cato is 
great without anything of fustian, and Cornelia, who besides 
is not a necessary character, tends sometimes to bombast." 
Even he, however, could not put up with the love-scenes : 

"Addison I'a deji tente; 
C'etoit le poete des sages, 
Mais 11 etoit trop concerte, 
Et dans son Caton si vante 
Les deux filles en verite, 
Sont d'insipides personages. 
Imitez du grand Addison 
Seulement ce qu'll a de bon." 

There were, of course, not wanting voices of detraction. 
A graduate of Oxford attacked Cato in a pamphlet entitled 
Mr. Addison turned Tory, in which the party spirit of the 
play was censured. Dr. Sewell, a well-known physician of 
the day — afterwards satirised by Pope as " Sanguine Sew- 
ell" — undertook Addison's defence, and showed that he 
owed his success to the poetical, and not to the political, 
merits of his drama. A much more formidable critic ap- 
peared in John Dennis, a specimen of whose criticism on 
Cato is preserved in Johnson's Life, and who, it must be 
owned, went a great deal nearer the mark in his judgment 
than did Voltaire. Dennis had many of the qualities of 



122 ADDISON. [chap. 

a good critic. Though his judgment was often overborne 
by his passion, he generally contrived to fasten on the 
weak points of the works which he criticised, and he at 
once detected the undramatic character of Cato. His rid- 
icule of the absurdities arising out of Addison's rigid ob- 
servance of the unity of place is extremely humorous and 
quite unanswerable. But, as usual, he spoiled his case by 
the violence and want of discrimination in his censure, 
which betrayed too plainly the personal feelings of the 
writer. It is said that Dennis was offended with Addison 
for not having adequately exhibited his talents in the 
Spectator when mention was made of his works ; and he 
certainly did complain in a published letter that Addison 
had chosen to quote a couplet from his translation of Boi- 
leau in preference to another from a poem on the battle 
of Ramilies, which he himself thought better of. But the 
fact seems to have been overlooked that Dennis had other 
grounds for resentment. In the 40th number of the Si^ec- 
tator the waiter speaks of " a ridiculous doctrine of mod- 
ern criticism, that they (tragic writers) are obliged to an 
equal distribution of rewards and punishments, and an 
impartial execution of poetical justice." This Avas a plain 
stroke at Dennis, who was a well-known advocate of the 
doctrine; and a considerable portion of the critic's gall 
was therefore expended on Addison's violation of the sup- 
posed rule in Cato. 

'Looking at Cato from Voltaire's point of view — which 
was Addison's own — and having regard to the spirit of 
elegance infused through every part of it, there is much 
to admire in the play. It is full of pointed sentences, 
such as — 

" 'Tis not in mortals to command success, 
But we'll do more, Semprouius, we'll deserve it." 



VI.] CATO. 123 

It has also many fine descriptive passages, tlie best of 
which, perhaps, occurs in the dialogue between Syphax 
and Juba respecting civilised and barbarian virtues : 

"Believe me, prince, there's not an African 
That traverses our vast Numidian deserts 
In quest of prey, and lives upon his bow, 
But better practises these boasted virtues. 
Coarse are his meals, the fortune of the chase ; 
Amidst the running streams he slakes his thirst. 
Toils all the day, and at th' approach of night 
On the first friendly bank he throws him down, 
Or rests his head upon a rock till morn — 
Then rises fresh, pursues his wonted game. 
And if the following day he chance to find 
A new repast, or an untasted spring, 
Blesses his stars, and thinks it luxury." 

But in all those parts of the poem where action and not 
ornament is demanded, we seem to perceive the work of a 
poet who was constantly thinking of what his characters 
ought to say in the situation, rather than of one who was 
actually living with them in the situation itself. Take 
Sempronius' speech to Syphax, describing the horrors of 
the conspirator's position : 

" Remember, Syphax, we must work in haste : 
Oh think what anxious moments pass between 
The birth of plots and their last fatal period. 
Oh ! 'tis a dreadful interval of time. 
Filled up with horror all, and big with death ! 
Destruction hangs on every word we speak, 
On every thought, till the concluding stroke 
Determines all, and closes our design." 

Compare with this the language of real tragedy, the solil- 
oquy of Brutus in Julius Ccesar, on which Addison appar- 
ently meant to improve : 
0* 



124 ADDISON. [chap.vi. 

"Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar 
I have not slept. 

Between the acting of a dreadful thing 
And the first motion, all the interim is 
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream : 
The genms and the mortal instruments 
Are then in council ; and the state of man, 
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
The nature of an insurrection." 

These two passages are good examples of the French 
and English ideals of dramatic diction, though the lines 
from Cato are more figurative than is usual in that play. 
Addison deliberately aimed at this French manner. " I 
must observe," says he, " that when our thoughts are great 
and just they are often obscured by the sounding phrases, 
hard metaphors, and forced expressions in which they are 
clothed. Shakespeare is often very faulty in this particu- 
lar." * Certainly he is ; but who does not see that, in spite 
of his metaphoric style, the speech of Brutus just quoted 
is far simpler and more natural than the elegant " correct- 
ness " of Sempronius. 

' Spectator, No. 39. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Addison's quarrel with pope. 

It has been said that with Cato the good fortune of Ad- 
dison reached its climax. After his triumph in the thea- 
tre, though he filled great offices in the State and wedded 
"a noble wife," his political success was marred by dis- 
agreements with one of his oldest friends; while with. the 
Countess of Warwick, if we are to believe Pope, he " mar- 
ried discord." Added to which he was unlucky enough 
to incur the enmity of the most poignant and vindictive 
of satiric poets, and a certain shadow has been for ever 
thrown over his character by the famous verses on " Atti- 
cus." It will be convenient in this chapter to investigate, 
as far as is possible, the truth as to the quarrel between 
Pope and Addison. The latter has hitherto been at a cer- 
tain disadvantage with the public, since the facts of the 
case were entirely furnished by Pope, and, though his ac- 
count was dissected with great acuteness by Blackstone in 
the Biographia Britannica, the partizans of the poet were 
still able to plead that his uncontradicted statements could 
not be disposed of by mere considerations of probability. 

Pope's account of his final rupture with Addison is re- 
ported by Spence as follows : " Philips seems to have 
been encouraged to abuse me in coffee-houses and conver- 
sations. Gildon wrote a thing about Wycherley in which 



126 ADDISON. [chap. 

he had 'abused both me and my relations very grossly. 
Lord Warwick himself told me one day ' that it was in 
vain for me to endeavour to be well with Mr. Addison ; 
that his jealous temper would never admit of a settled 
friendship between us ; and, to convince me of what he 
had said, assured me that Addison had encouraged Gildon 
to publish those scandals, and had given him ten guineas 
after they were published.' The next day, while I was 
heated with what I had heard, I wrote a letter to Mr. Ad- 
dison to let him know ' that I was not unacquainted with 
this behaviour of his; that, if I was to speak severely of 
him in return for it, it should not be in such a dirty way ; 
that I would rather tell him himself fairly of his faults and 
allow his good qualities ; and that it should be something 
in the following manner.' I then subjoined the first sketch 
of what has since been called my satire on Addison. He 
used me very civilly ever after; and never did me any in- 
justice, that I know of, from that time to his death, which 
was about three years after." ^ 

Such was the story told by Pope in his own defence 
against the charge that he had written and circulated the 
lines on Addison after the latter's death. In confirmation 
of his evidence, and in proof of his own good feeling for 
and open dealing with Addison, he inserted in the so-called 
authorised edition of his correspondence in 1737 several 
letters written apparently to Addison, while in what he 
pretended to be the surreptitious edition of 1735 appeared 
a letter to Craggs, written in July, 1715, which, as it con- 
tained many of the phrases and expressions used in the 
character of Atticus, created an impression in the mind of 
the public that both letter and verses were written about 
the same time. No suspicion as to the genuineness of this 
' Spence's Anecdotes, pp. 148, 149. 



Til.] QUARREL WITH POPE. 127 

correspondence was raised till the discovery of the Caryll 
letters, which first revealed the fact that most of the pre- 
tended letters to Addison had been really addressed to 
Caryll ; that there had been, in fact, no correspondence 
between Pope and Addison ; and that, therefore, in all 
probability, the letter to Craggs was also a fictitious com- 
position, inserted in the so-called surreptitious volume of 
1735 to establish the credit of Pope's own story. 

We must accordingly put aside, as undeserving of cre- 
dence, the poet's ingeniously constructed charge, at any 
rate in the particular shape in which it is preferred, and 
must endeavour to form for ourselves such a judgment as 
is rendered probable by the acknowledged facts of the 
case. What is indisputable is that in 1715 a rupture took 
place between Addison and Pope, in consequence of the 
injury which the translator of the Iliad conceived himself 
to have suffered from the countenance given to Tickell's 
rival performance; and that in 1723 we find the first men- 
tion of the satire upon Addison in a letter from Atterbury 
to Pope. The question is, what blame attaches to Addi- 
son for his conduct in the matter of .the two translations ; 
and what is 1<he amount of truth in Pope's story respect- 
ing the composition of the verses on Atticus. 

Pope made Addison's acquaintance in the year 1712. 
On the 20th of December,l7ll, Addison had noticed Pope's 
Art of Critibism in the 253d number of the Spectator — 
partly, no doubt, in consequence of his perception of the 
merits of the poem, but probably at the particular instiga- 
tion of Steele, whose acquaintance with Pope may have 
been due to the common friendship of both with Caryll. 
The praise bestowed on the Essay (as it was afterwards 
called) was of the finest and most liberal kind, and was 
the more welcome because it was preceded by a censure 



128 ADDISON. [chap. 

conveyed with admirable delicacy on " the strokes of ill- 
nature" which the poem contained. Pope was naturally 
exceedingly pleased, and wrote to Steele a letter of thanks 
under the impression that the latter was the writer of the 
paper, a misapprehension which Steele at once hastened to 
correct. " The paper," says he, " was written by one with 
whom I will make you acquainted — which is the best re- 
turn I can make to you for your favour." 

These words were doubtless used by Steele in the warmth 
of his affection for Addison, but they also express the -gen- ■ 
eral estimation in which the latter was then held. He had 
recently established his man Button in a coffee-house in 
Covent Garden, where, surrounded by his little senate, Bud- 
gell, Tickell, Carey, and Philips, he ruled supreme over 
the world of taste and letters. Something, no doubt, of 
the spirit of the coterie pervaded the select assembly. Ad- 
dison could always find a word of condescending praise 
for his followers in the pages of the Spectator ^ he cor- 
rected their plays and mended their prologues ; and they 
on their side paid back their patron with unbounded rev- 
erence, perhaps justifying the satirical allusion of the poet 
to the " applause " so grateful to the ear of Atticus : 

" While wits and Templars every sentence raise, 
And wonder with a foolish face of praise." 

Pope, according to his own account, was admitted to the 
society, and left it, as he said, because he found it sit 
too far into the night for his health. It may, however, 
be suspected that the natures of the author of the Dun- 
ciad and of the creator of Sir Roger de Coverley, though 
touching each other at many points, were far from nat- 
urally congenial ; that the essayist was well aware that the 
man who could write the Essay on Criticism had a higher 



VII.] QUARREL WITH POPE. 129 

capacity for poetry than either himself or any of his fol- 
lowers ; and that the poet, on his side, conscious of great 
if undeveloped powers, was inclined to resent the air of 
patronage with which he was treated by the King of 
Button's. Certain it is that the praise of Pope by Addi- 
son in number 253 of the Spectator is qualified (though 
by no means unjustly), and that he is not spoken of with 
the same warmth as Tickell and Ambrose Philips in num- 
ber 523. " Addison," said Pope to Spence, " seemed to 
value himself more upon his poetry than upon his prose, 
though he wrote the latter with such particular ease, flu- 
ency, and happiness." ' This often happens ; and perhaps 
the uneasy consciousness that, in spite of the reputation 
which his Campaign had secured for him, he was really 
inferior to such men as John Philips and Tickell, made 
Addison touchy at the idea of the entire circle being out- 
shone by a new candidate for poetical fame. 

Whatever jealousy, however, existed between the two 
was carefully suppressed during the first year of their ac- 
quaintance. Pope showed Addison the first draft of the 
Rape of the Lock, and, according to Warburton (whose 
account must be received with suspicion), imparted to him 
his design of adding the fairy machinery. If Addison 
really endeavoured to dissuade the poet from making this 
exquisite addition, the latter was on his side anxious that 
Cato, which, as has been said, was shown to him after its 
completion, should not be presented on the stage ; and 
his advice, if tested by the result, would have been quite 
as open as Addison's to an unfavourable construction. 
He wrote, however, for the play the famous Prologue 
which Steele inserted, with many compliments, in the 
Guardian. But not long afterwards the effect of the 
* Spence's Anecdotes, p. 25V. 



130 ADDISON. [chap. 

compliments was spoiled by the comparatively cold men- 
tion of Pope's Pastorals in the same paper that contained 
a glowing panegyric on the Pastorals of Ambrose Philips. 
In revenge, Pope wrote his paper commending Philips' 
performance and depreciating his own, the irony of which, 
it is said, escaping the notice of Steele, was inserted by 
him in the Guardian, much to the amusement of Addi- 
son and more to the disgust of Philips. 

The occasion on which Pope's pique against Addison 
began to develop into bitter resentment is suflBciently in- 
dicated by the date which the poet assigns to the first 
letter in the concocted correspondence — viz., July 20, 1713. 
This letter (which is taken, with a few slight alterations of 
names, from one written to Caryll on November 19, 1712) 
opens as follows : 

" I am more joyed at your return than I should be at that of the 
sun, so much as I wish for him this melancholy wet season ; but it 
has a fate too like yours to be displeasing to owls and obscure ani- 
mals who cannot bear his lustre. What puts me in mind of these 
night-birds was John Dennis, whom I think you are best revenged 
upon, as the sun was in the fable upon those bats and beastly birds 
above mentioned, only by shining on, I am so far from esteeming 
it any misfortune, that I congratulate you upon having your share in 
that which all the great men and all the good men that ever lived 
have had their part of — envy and calumny. To be uncensured and 
to be obscure is the same thing. You may conclude from what I 
here say that it was never in my thoughts to have offered you my 
pen in any direct reply to such a critic, but only in some little raillery, 
not in defence of you, but in contempt of him." 

The allusion is to the squib called Dr. JVorris^ Narra- 
tive of the Frenzy of John Dennis, which, it appears, was 
shown to Addison by Pope before its appearance, and 
after the publication of ^hich Addison caused Steele to 
write to Lintot in the following terms : 



Til.] QUARREL WITH POPE. 131 

" Mr. Lintot, — Mr. Addison desired me to tell you that he wholly 
disapproves the manner of treating Mr. Dennis in a little pamphlet 
by way of Mr. Norris' account. When he thinks fit to take notice 
of Mr. Dennis' objections to his writings, he will do it in a way Mr. 
Dennis shall have no just reason to complain of. But when the 
papers above mentioned were offered to be communicated to him he 
said he could not, either in honour or conscience, be privy to such a 
treatment, and was sorry to hear of it. — I am, sir, your very humble 
servant." » 

Pope's motive in writing the pamphlet was, as John- 
son says, " to give his resentment full play without ap- 
pearing to revenge himself" for the attack which Dennis 
had made on his own poems. Addison doubtless divined 
the truth ; but the wording of the letter which he caused 
a third person to write to Lintot certainly seems studious- 
ly offensive to Pope, who had, professedly at any rate, 
placed his pen at his service, and who had connected his 
own name with Cato by the fine Prologue he had written 
in its praise. Lintot would of course have shown Pope 
Steele's letter, and we may be sure that the lofty tone 
taken by Addison in speaking of the pamphlet would 
have rankled bitterly in the poet's mind. 

At the same time Philips, who was naturally enraged 
with Pope on account of the ridicule with which the lat- 
ter had covered his- Pastorals, endeavoured to widen the 
breach by spreading a report that Pope had entered into 
a conspiracy to write against the Whigs, and to under- 
mine the reputation of Addison. Addison seems to have 
lent a ready ear to these accusations. At any rate Pope 
thought so ; for when the good - natured painter Jervas 
sought to bring about a composition, he wrote to him 
(27th August, 1714): 

" What you mentioned of the friendly office you endeavoured to 
do. betwixt Mr. Addison and me deserves acknowledgment on my 



132 ADDISON. [chap. 

part. You thoroughly know my regard to his character, and my 
propensity to testify it by all ways in my power. You as thorough- 
ly know the scandalous meanness of that proceeding, which was used 
by Philips, to make a man I so highly value suspect my disposition 
towards him. But as, after all, Mr. Addison must be the judge in 
what regards himself, and has seemed to be no very just one to me, 
so I must own to you I expect nothing but civility from him, how 
much soever I wish for his friendship. As for any offices of real 
kindness or service which it is in his power to do me, I should be 
ashamed to receive them from any man who had no better opinion 
of my morals than to think me a party man, nor of my temper than 
to believe me capable of maligning or envying another's reputation 
as a poet. So I leave it to time to convince him as to both, to show 
him the shallow depths of those half-witted creatures who misin- 
formed him, and to prove that I am incapable of endeavouring to 
lessen a person whom I would be proud to imitate, and therefore 
ashamed to flatter. In a word, Mr. Addison is sure of my respect at 
all times, and of my real friendship whenever he shall think fit to 
know me for what I am." 

It is evident, from the tone of this letter, tliat all the 
materials for a violent quarrel were in existence. On the 
one side was Addison, with probably an instinctive dislike 
of Pope's character, intensified by the injurious reports 
circulated against Pope in the "little senate" at Button's; 
with a nature somewhat cold and reserved ; and with some- 
thing of literary jealousy, partly arising from a sense of 
vi^hat was due to his acknowledged supremacy, and partly 
from a perception that there had appeared a very formida- 
ble " brother near the throne." On the side of Pope there 
was an eager sensitiveness, ever craving for recognition 
and praise, with an abnormal irritability prone to watch 
for, and reluctant to forgive, anything in the shape of a 
slight or an injury. Slights and injuries he already deemed 
himself to have received, and accordingly, when Tickell, 
in 1715, published his translation of the First Book of the 



vii.] QUARREL WITH POPE. 133 

Iliad at the same time with his own translation of the 
first four books, his smothered resentment broke into a 
blaze at what he imagined to be a conspiracy to damage 
his poetical reputation. Many years afterwards, when the 
quarrel between Addison and himself had become notori- 
ous, he arranged his version of it for the public in a man- 
ner which is, indeed, far from assisting us to a knowl- 
edge of the truth, but which enables us to understand 
very clearly what was passing in his own mind at the 
time. 

The subscription for Pope's translation of the Iliad was 
set on foot in November, 1713. On the 10th October, 
1714, having two books completed, he wished to submit 
them — or at any rate he told the public so in 1735 — to 
Addison's judgment. Tliis was at a date when, as he in- 
formed Spence, " there had been a coldness between Mr. 
Addison and me" for some time. According to the letter 
which appears in his published correspondence, he wrote 
to Addison on the subject as follows : 

" I have been acquainted by one of my friends, who omits no 
opportunities of gratifying me, that you have lately been pleased to 
speak of me^in a manner which nothing but the real respect I have 
for you can deserve. May I hope that some late malevolences have 
lost their effect ? ... As to what you have said of me I shall never be- 
lieve that the author of Cato can speak one thing and think another. 
As a proof that I account you sincere, I beg a favour of you : it is that 
you would look over the two first books of my translation of Homer, 
which are in the hands of Lord Halifax. I am sensible how much 
the reputation of any poetical work will depend upon the character 
you give it. It is therefore some evidence of the trust I repose in 
your good will when I give you this opportunity of speaking ill of me 
with justice, and yet expect you will tell me your truest thoughts at 
the same time you tell others your most favourable ones." ' 

' Pope's Works, Elwin and Courthope's edition, vol. vi. p. 408. 



134 ADDISON. [chap. 

Whether the facts reported in this letter were as fictitious 
as we have a right to assume the letter itself to be, it is 
impossible to say ; Pope at any rate told Spence the fol- 
lowing story, which is clearly meant to fall in with the 
evidence of the correspondence : 

"On his meeting me there (Button's Coffee-House) he took me 
aside and said he should be glad to dine with me at such a tavern if 
I would stay till those people (Budgell and Philips) were gone. We 
went accordingly, and after dinner Mr. Addison said ' that he had 
wanted for some time to talk with me : that his friend Tickell had 
formerly, while at Oxford, translated the first book of the Iliad. 
That he now designed to print it, and had desired him to look it 
over : he must therefore beg that I would not desire him to look 
over my first book, because, if he did, it would have the air of double 
dealing.' I assured him that I did not take it ill of Mr. Tickell that 
he was going to publish his translation ; that he certainly had as 
much right to translate any author as myself; and that publishing 
both was entering on a fair stage. I then added ' that I would not 
desire him to look over my first book of the Iliad, because he had 
looked over Mr. Tickell's, but could wish to have the benefit of his 
observations on my second, which I had then finished, and which 
Mr. Tickell had not touched upon.' Accordingly, I sent him the sec- 
ond book the next morning ; and in a few days he returned it with 
very high commendation. Soon after it was generally known that 
Mr. Tickell was publishing the first book of the Iliad I met Dr. 
Young in the street, and, upon our falling into that subject, the doc- 
tor expressed a great deal of surprise at Tickell's having such a 
translation by him so long. He said that it was inconceivable to 
him, and that there must be some mistake in the matter ; that he 
and Tickell were so intimately acquainted at Oxford that each used 
to communicate to the other whatever verses they wrote, even to the 
least things ; that Tickell could not have been busied in so long a 
work there without his knowing something of the matter ; and that 
he had never heard a single word of it till this occasion." ' 

It is scarcely necessary to say that, after the light that 
' Spence's Anecdotes, p. 146. 



Til.] QUARREL WITH POPE. 135 

has been thrown on Pope's character by the detection of 
the frauds he practised in the publication of his corre- 
spondence, it is impossible to give any credence to the 
tales he poured into Spence's ear, tending to blacken Addi- 
son's character and to exalt his own. Tickell's MS. of the 
translation is in existence, and all the evidence tends to 
show that he was really the author of it. But the above 
statement may be taken to reflect accurately enough the 
rage, the resentment, and the suspicion which disturbed 
Pope's own mind on the appearance of the rival transla- 
tion. We can scarcely doubt that it was this, and this 
alone, which roused him to such glowing indignation and 
inspired him to write the character of Atticus. When the 
verses were made public, after Addison's death, he proba- 
bly perceived that the public would not consider the evi- 
dence for Addison's collusion with Tickell to be sufficiently 
strong to afford a justification for the bitterness of the sat- 
ire. It was necessary to advance some stronger plea for 
such retaliation, especially as rumour confidently asserted 
that the lines had not been written till after Addison was 
dead. Hence the story told by Pope to Spence, proving 
first that the lines were not only written during Addison's 
lifetime, but were actually sent to Addison himself; and 
secondly, that they were only composed after the strongest 
evidence had been afforded to the poet of his rival's malig- 
nant disposition towards him. Hence, too, the publication 
in 1735 of the letter to Craggs, which, containing as it did 
many of the phrases and metaphors employed in the verses, 
seemed to supply indirect: evidence that both were written 
about the same period. 

With regard to Pope's story, it is not too much to say 
that it entirely breaks down on examination. He professes 
to give it on the authority of Lord Warwick himself, reck- 



136 ADDISON. [chap. 

ouing, of course, that the evidence of Addison's own step- 
son would be conclusive with the public. But Addison 
was not married to the Countess of Warwick till August, 
1716 ; and in the previous May he had bestowed the most 
liberal praise on Pope's translation in one of his papers in 
the Freeholder. For Lord Warwick, therefore, to argue 
at that date that Addison's ^'■jealous temjjer could never 
admit of a settled friendship" between him and Pope was 
out of the question. If, on the other hand. Lord Warwick 
told his story to Pope before his mothers marriage, the 
diflBculty is equally great. The letter to Craggs, which, if 
it was ever sent to the latter at all, must obviously have 
been written in the same "heat" which prompted the sat- 
ire on Atticus, is dated July 15, 1715. This fits in well 
enough with the date of the dispute about the rival trans- 
lations of the Hiad^ but not with Lord Warwick's story, 
for Wycherley, after whose death Gildon, we are told, was 
hired by Addison to abuse Pope, did not die till the De- 
cember of that year. 

Again, the internal evidence of the character itself 
points to the fact that, when it was first composed, its 
" heat " was riot caused by any information the poet had 
received of a transaction between Addison and Gildon. 
The following is the first published version of the satire : 

" If Dennis writes and rails in furious pet 
I'll answer Dennis when I am in debt. 
If meagre Gildon draw his meaner quill, 
I wish the man a dinner and sit still. 
But should there One whose better stars conspire 
To form a bard, and raise a genius higher, 
Blest with each talent and each art to please, 
And born to live, converse, and write with ease ; 
Should such a one, resolved to reign alone, 
Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne, 



Til.] QUARREL WITH POPE. 13V 

View him with jealous yet with scornful eyes, 
Hate him for arts that caused himself to rise, 
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, 
And without sneering teach the rest to sneer ; 
Alike reserved to blame or to commend, 
A timorous foe and a suspicious friend, 
Fearing e'en fools, by flatterers besieged. 
And so obliging that he ne'er obliged ; 
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, 
Just hit the fault, and hesitate dislike, 
TI7to when two wits on rival themes contest. 
Approves of both, but likes the worst the best ; 
Like Cato, give his little senate laws 
And sits attentive to his own applause ; 
While wits and templars every sentence praise 
And wonder with a foolish face of praise : 
Who would not laugh if such a man there be ? 
Who would not weep if Addison were he ?" 

There is sufficient corroborative evidence to allow us to be- 
lieve that these lines were actually written, as Pope says, 
during Addison's lifetime ; and if they were, the charac- 
ter of the satire would naturally suggest that its motive 
was Addison's supposed conduct in the matter of the two 
translations of the Iliad. There is nothing in them to 
indicate any connection in the poet's mind between Gil- 
don and Addison ; on the other hand, the allusion to the 
"two wits" shows the special grievance that formed the 
basis, in his imagination, of the whole character. After- 
wards we find that " meaner quill " is replaced by " venal 
quill ;" and the couplet about the rival translations is sup- 
pressed. The inference is plain. When Pope was charged 
with having written the character after Addison's death, 
he found himself obliged, in self-defence, to furnish a 
moral justification for the satire ; and, after his own un- 
fortunate manner, he proceeded to build up for himself a 



138 ADDISON. [chap. tii. 

position on a number of systematic falsehoods. His story 
was probably so far true that the character was really 
written while Addison was alive ; on the other hand, it is 
not unreasonable to conclude that the entire statement 
about Gildon and Lord Warwick is fabulous ; and, as the 
assertion that the lines were sent to Addison immediate- 
ly after their composition is associated with these myths, 
this, too, may fairly be dismissed as equally undeserving of 
belief. 

As to the truth of the character of Atticus, however, 
it by no means follows, because Pope's account of its ori- 
gin is false, that the portrait itself is altogether untrue. 
The partizans of Addison endeavour to prove that it is 
throughout malicious and unjust. But no one can fail to 
perceive that the character itself is a very extraordinary 
picture of human nature; and there is no reason to sup- 
pose that Addison was superior to the weaknesses of his 
kind. On the contrary, there is independent evidence to 
show that he was strongly influenced by that literary jeal- 
ousy which makes the groundwork of the ideal character. 
This the piercing intelligence of Pope no doubt plainly 
discerned ; his inflamed imagination built up on this foun- 
dation the wonderful fabric that has ever since continued 
to enchant the world. The reader who is acquainted with 
his own heart will probably not find much difliculty in 
determining what elements in the character are derived 
from the substantial truth of nature, and what are to be 
ascribed to the exaggerated perceptions of Genius. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE. 

The representation of Cato on the stage was a turning 
point in the political fortunes of the Whigs. In the same 
month the Queen announced, on the meeting of Parlia- 
ment, the signature of the Treaty of Utrecht. Whatever 
were the merits or demerits of the policy embodied in this 
instrument, it offered many points of attack to a compact 
and vigorous Opposition. The most salient of these was, 
perhaps, the alleged sacrifice of British commercial inter- 
ests through the incompetence or corruption of the nego- 
tiators, and on this question the Whigs accordingly raised 
vehement and reiterated debates. Addison aided his. po- 
litical friends with an ingenious pamphlet on the subject, 
called The late Trial and Conviction of Count Tariff, con- 
taining a narrative of the lawsuit between the Count and 
Goodman Fact, which is written with much spirit and pleas- 
antry. It is said that he also took the field in answer to 
the Address to the Queen from the magistrates of Dun- 
kirk, wherein Her Majesty was requested to waive the 
execution of the article in the Treaty providing for the 
demolition of the harbour and fortifications of that town ; 
but if he wrote on the subject the 'pamphlet has not been 
preserved by Tickell. His old friend Steele was mean- 
while involving himself in difficulties through the heat 
7 



140 ADDISOX. [chap. 

and impetuosity of his party passions. After the pain- 
ful abstinence from partizanship imposed on him by the 
scheme of the Taller and Spectator he had founded the 
Guardian on similar lines, and had carried it on in a non- 
political spirit up to the 128th number, when his Whig 
feelings could restrain themselves no longer, and he in- 
serted a letter signed by "An English Tory," demanding 
the immediate demolition of Dunkirk. Soon afterwards he 
published a pamphlet called The Crisis, to excite the ap- 
prehensions of the nation with regard to the Protestant 
succession, and, dropping the Guardian, started the £nff- 
lishman, a political paper of extreme Whig views. He 
further irritated the Tory majority in Parliament by sup- 
porting the proposal of Sir Thomas Hanmer, as Speaker 
of the House of Commons, in a speech violently reflecting 
on the rejected Bill for a Treaty of Commerce with France. 
A complaint was brought before the House against the 
Crisis, and two numbers of the Englishman, and Steele 
was ordered to attend and answer for his conduct. After 
the charge had been preferred against him, he asked for 
time to arrange his defence ; and this being granted him, 
after a warm debate, he reappeared in his place a few days 
later, and made a long and able speech, which is said to 
have been prepared for him by Addison, acting under the 
instructions of the Kit-Kat Club. It did not, however, 
save him from being expelled from the House. 

Addison himself stood aloof, as far as was possible, from 
the heated atmosphere of party, occupying his time chiefly 
with the execution of literary designs. In 1713 he began 
a work on the Evidences of Christianity, which he never 
finished, and in the last half of the year 1714 he com- 
pleted the eighth volume of the Spectator. So moderate 
was his political attitude that Bolingbroke was not with- 



Tin.] THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE. 141 

out hopes of bringing him over to the Tory side ; an in- 
terview, however, convinced him that it was useless to 
dream of converting Addison's steady constitutional prin- 
ciple to his own ambitious schemes. 

The condition of the Tory party was indeed rapidly be- 
coming desperate. Its leaders were at open variance with 
each other. Oxford, a veteran intriguer, was desirous of 
combining wuth the Whigs ; the more daring and brill- 
iant Bolingbroke aimed at the restoration of the exiled 
Stuarts, His influence, joined to natural family affec- 
tion, prevailed with the Queen, who was persuaded to de- 
prive Oxford of the Treasurer's staff. But her health 
was undermined, and a furious and indecent dispute be- 
tween the two Tory leaders in her own presence com- 
pletely prostrated her. She was carried from the Coun- 
cil, and sinking into a state of unconsciousness from which 
she never recovered, died on the 1st of August, 1714. 

Meantime the Whigs were united and prepared. On the 
meeting of the Council, George I. was proclaimed King 
without opposition : Lord-Justices were authorised to ad- 
minister affairs provisionally, and Addison was appointed 
their Secretary. It is said, though on no good authority, 
that having, in discharge of his office, to announce to 
George I. the death of the Queen, Addison was embar- 
rassed in his choice of phrases for the occasion, and that 
the duty to which the best writer in the Spectator proved 
unequal was performed by a common clerk. Had Addi- 
son been quite unfamiliar with public life this story would 
have been more credible, but his experience in Ireland 
must have made him acquainted with the peculiarities of 
official English ; and some surviving specimens of his pub- 
lic correspondence prove him to have been a sufficient 
master in the art of saying nothing in a magnificent way. ' 



142 ADDISON. [chap. 

On the arrival of the King in England, the Earl of Sun- 
derland was appointed to succeed the Duke of Shrewsbury 
as Lord-Lieutenant of L-eland, and he once more offered 
Addison the post of Chief Secretary. In that office the 
latter continued till the Earl's resignation of the Lord- 
Lieutenancy in August, 1V15. It would appear to have 
been less lucrative to him than when he previously held 
it, and, indeed, than he himself had expected ; the cause 
of this deficiency being, as he states, " his Lordship's ab- 
sence from that kingdom, and his not being qualified to 
give out military commissions." ' He is said, neverthe- 
less, to have shown the strictest probity and honour in his 
official dealings, and some of his extant correspondence 
(the authenticity of which, however, is guaranteed only 
by the unsatisfactory testimony of Curll) shows him to 
have declined, in a very high-minded manner, a present 
of money, evidently intended to secure his interest on be- 
half of an applicant. He seems to have been in London 
almost as much as in Dublin during his tenure of office, 
and he found time in the midst of his public business to 
compose another play for the stage. 

There appears to be no good reason for doubting that 
The Drummer was the work of Addison. It is true 
that it was not included by Tickell in his edition of his 
friend's writings ; and Steele, in the letter to Congreve 
which he prefixed to the second edition of the play, only 
says that Addison sent for him when he was a patentee 
of Drury Lane Theatre, and told him " that a gentleman 
then in the room had written a play which he was sure 
I should like, but it was to be a secret; and he knew I 
would take as much pains, since he recommended it, as 
I would for him." But Steele could, under such circum- 
' Addison's Memorial to the Kinp;. 



VIII.] THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE. 143 

stances, hardly have been deceived as to the real author- 
ship of the play, and if confirmatory evidence is required, 
it is furnished by Theobald, who tells us that Addison in- 
formed him that he had taken the character of Vellum, 
the steward, from Fletcher's Scornful Lady. Addison 
was probably not anxious himself to assert his right of 
paternity to the play. It was acted at Drury Lane, and, 
the name of the author being unknown, was coldly re- 
ceived ; a second performance of it after Addison's death, 
when the authorship was proclaimed, was naturally more 
successful ; but, in fact, the piece is, like Cato, a standing 
proof of Addison's deficiency in dramatic genius. The 
plot is poor and trivial ; nor does the dialogue, though it 
shows in many passages traces of its author's peculiar vein 
of humour, make amends by its brilliancy for the tarae- 
ness of the dramatic situation. 

He was soon, however, called upon to employ his pen 
on a task better suited to his powers. In September, 
1715, there was a rising in Scotland and in the North of 
England on behalf of the Pretender. The rebellion was 
put down with little diflSculty, but the position of the 
House of Brunswick was far more precarious than on the 
surface it seemed to be. It could count, no doubt, on the 
loyalty of a House of Commons elected when the Tories 
were momentarily stunned by the death of Queen Anne, 
on the faith of the army, and on the support of the mon- 
eyed interest. On the other hand, the two most important 
classes in the kingdom — the landed proprietors and the 
clergy — were generally hostile to the new regbne, and the 
influence exercised by the latter was of course exceedingly 
great in days when the pulpit was still the chief instru- 
ment in the formation of public opinion. The weight of 
some powerful writer was urgently needed on the Whig 



144 ADDISON. [chap. 

side, and Addison — who in tlie preceding August had been 
obliged to vacate his office of Secretary in consequence of 
the resignation of the Lord-Lieutenant — was by common 
consent indicated as the man best qualified for the task. 
There were indeed hot political partizans who questioned 
his capacity. Steele said that " the Government had made 
choice of a lute when they ought to have taken a trum- 
pet." But if by the "trumpet" he was modestly allud- 
ing to himself, it may very well be doubted if the ob- 
jects of the Government would have been attained by em- 
ploying the services of the author of the Englishraan. 
What was wanted was not party invective, but the calm 
persuasiveness of reason ; a pen that could prove to all 
Tory country gentlemen and thoroughgoing High Church- 
men that the Protestant succession was indispensable to 
the safety of the principles which each respectively con- 
sidered to be of vital importance. This was the task which 
lay before Addison, and which he accomplished with con- 
summate skill in the Freeholder. 

The name of the new paper was selected by him in or- 
der to suggest that property was the basis of liberty ; and 
his main argument, which he introduces under constantly 
varying forms, is that there could be no safety for property 
under a line of monarchs who claimed the dispensing pow- 
er, and no security for the liberties of the Church under 
kings of an alien religion. In order to secure variety of 
treatment, the exact social position of the Freeholder is 
not defined : 

"At the same time that I declare I am a freeholder I do not ex- 
clude myself from any other title. A freeholder may be either a 
voter or a knight of the shire, a wit or a fox-hunter, a scholar or a 
soldier, an alderman or a courtier, a patriot or a stock-jobber. But 
I choose to be distinguished by this denomination, as the freeholder 



vni.] THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE. 145 

is the basis of all other titles. Dignities may be grafted upon it, 
but this is the substantial stock that conveys to them their life, 
taste, and beauty, and without which they are blossoms tliat jvould 
fall away with every shake of wind." ' 

By this means he was able to impart liveliness to his 
theme, which he diversifies by philosophical disquisition ; 
by good-natured satire on the prejudices of the country 
gentlemen ; by freqnent papers on his favourite subject, 
" the fair sex ;" and by occasional glances at literature. 
Though his avowed object was to prove the superiority of 
the Whig over the Tory theory of the Constitution, his 
"native moderation" never deserts him, and he often lets 
his di.sgust at the stupidity of faction, and his preference 
for social over political writing, appear in the midst of his 
argument. The best papers in the series are undoubtedly 
the " Memoirs of a Preston Rebel " and the " Tory Fox- 
hunter," both of which are full of the exquisite humour 
that distinguishes the sketches of Sir Roger de Cover- 
ley. The Freeholder was only continued for six months 
(December 23, 1715, to June 9, 1716), being published 
every Friday and Monday, and being completed in fifty-five 
numbers. In the last number the essjiyist described the 
nature of his work, and gave his reasons for discontinuing 
it: 

" It would not be difficult to continue a paper of this kind if one 
were disposed to resume the same subjects and weary out the reader 
with the same thoughts in a different phrase, or to ramble through 
the cause of Whig and Tory without any certain aim or method in 
every particular discourse. Such a practice in political writers is 
like that of some preachers taken notice of by Dr. South, who, being 
prepared only upon two or three points of doctrine, run the same 
round with their audience from one end of the year to the other, and 
are always forced to tell them, by way of preface, ' These are par- 

' Freeliolder, No. \. 



146 ADDISON". [chap. 

ticulars of so great importance that they cannot be sufficiently incul- 
cated.' To avoid this method of tautology, I have endeavoured to 
make every paper a distinct essay upon some particular subject, 
without deviating into points foreign to the tenor of each discourse. 
They are, indeed, most of them essays upon Government, but with a 
view to the present situation of affairs in Great Britain, so that, if 
they have the good fortune to live longer than works of this nature 
generally do, future readers may see in them the complexion of the 
times in which they were written. However, as there is no employ- 
ment so irksome as that of transcribing out of one's self next to 
that of transcribing out of others, I shall let drop the work, since 
there do not occur to me any material points arising from our pres- 
ent situation which I have not already touched upon." 

It was probably in reward for his services in publishing 
the Freeholder that he was made one of the Commission- 
ers for Trade and Colonies. Soon after his appointment 
to this office he married Charlotte, Countess of Warwick, 
daughter of Sir Thomas Myddleton, of Chirk Castle, 
Denbighshire. His attachment to the Countess is said to 
have begun years before ; and this seems not unlikely, for, 
though the story of his having been tutor to the young 
Earl is obviously groundless, two charming letters of his 
to the latter are in existence which show that as early as 
1708 he took a strong interest in the family. These let- 
ters, which are written entirely on the subject of birds, 
may, of course, have been inspired merely by an affection 
for the boy himself; but it is not unreasonable to suppose 
that the writer felt a yet stronger interest in the mother, 
though her indifference, or his natural diffidence, led him 
to disguise his feelings ; perhaps, indeed, the episode of 
Sir Roger de Coverley's love passage with the cruel widow 
may be founded on personal experience. We have seen 
him in 1711 reporting to a friend that the loss of his 
place had involved that of his mistress. Possibly the same 



VIII.] THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE. 147 

hard-lieai'ted mistress condescended to relent when she saw 
her former lover once more on the road to high State pre- 
ferment. 

Report says that the marriage was not a happy one. 
The tradition, however, like so many others about the 
same person, seems to have been derived from Pope, who, 
in his Epistle to Arbuthnot, congratulates himself — with, 
an evident glance at Addison — on "not marrying discord 
with a noble wife," An innuendo of this kind, and com- 
ing from such a quarter, ought not to be accepted as evi- 
dence without some corroboration ; and the only corrobo- 
ration which is forthcoming is a letter of Lady Mary Wort- 
ley Montagu, who writes from Constantinople in I7l7: 
"I received the news of Mr. Addison's being declared Sec- 
retary of State with the less surprise in that I know the 
post was offered to him before. At that time he declined 
it; and I really believe he would have done well to decline 
it now. Such a post as that and such a wife as the Count- 
ess do not seem to be, in prudence, eligible for a man that 
is asthmatic, and we may see the day when he will be glad 
to resign them both." Lady Mary, however, does not hint 
that Addison was then living unhappily with his wife ; her 
expressions seem to be inspired rather by her own sharp 
wit and a personal dislike of the Countess than by any 
knowledge of discord in the household. On the other 
hand, Addison speaks of his wife in a way which is scarce- 
ly consistent with what Johnson calls " uncontradicted re- 
port." On March 20th, 1718, he writes to Swift : " When- 
ever you see England your company will be the most 
acceptable in the world at Holland House, where you are 
highly esteemed by Lady Warwick and the young Lord." 
A henpecked husband would hardly have invited the Dean 
of St. Patrick's to be the witness of his domestic discom- 



148 ADDISON. [cuap. 

fort. Nor do the terms of his will, dated only a month 
before his death, indicate that he regarded his wife with 
feelings other than those of affection and respect: "I do 
make and ordain my said dear wife executrix of this my 
last will ; and I do appoint her to be guardian of my dear 
child, Charlotte Addison, until she shall attain her age of 
one-and-twenty, being well assured that she will take due 
care of her education, and provide for her in case she live 
to be married." On the whole, it seems reasonable to put 
positive evidence of this kind against those vague rumours 
of domestic unhappiness Avhich, however unsubstantial, are 
so easily propagated and so readily believed. 

In April, 1717, the dissensions between the two sections 
of the Whig Cabinet, led respectively by Townshend and 
Sunderland, reached a climax, and Townshend being worst- 
ed, Sunderland became Prime Minister. He at once ap- 
pointed his old subordinate one of the Secretaries of State, 
and Addison filled the office for eleven months. " It is 
universally confessed," says Johnson, " that he was unequal 
to the duties of his place." Here again the " universal 
confession " dwindles on examination to something very 
different. As far as his conduct in administration required 
to be defended in Parliament, his inaptitude for the place 
was no doubt conspicuous. He had been elected member 
of Parliament for Lostwithiel in 1708, and when that elec- 
tion was set aside he was chosen for Malraesbury, a seat 
which he retained for the rest of his life. He made, how- 
ever, but one effort to address the House, when, being con- 
fused with the cheers which greeted him, he was unable to 
complete his sentence, and, resuming his seat, never again 
opened his lips. 

But in other respects the evidence of his official inca- 
pacity seems to proceed solely from his enemies. " Mr. 



nil.] THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE. 149 

Addison," said Pope to Spence, "could not give out a 
common order in writing from his endeavouring always to 
word it too finely. He had too beautiful an imagination 
to make a man of business." ' Copies of official letters 
and despatches written by Addison are, however, in exist- 
ence, and prove him to have been a sufficient master of 
a business style, so that, though his lack of ability as a 
speaker may well have impaired his efficiency as a mem- 
ber of the Government, Johnson has little warrant for say- 
ing that ''''finding by experience his oivn inahilitij, he was 
forced to solicit his dismission with a pension of fifteen 
hundred pounds a year." As a matter of fact, Addison's 
own petition to the King and his private correspondence 
prove with sufficient clearness that his resignation was 
caused entirely by his failing health ; while the congratu- 
latory Latin verses addressed to him by Vincent Bourne, 
on his recovery from one of his seizures of asthma, show 
that his illness was of the most serious nature. 

He resigned his post, however, in March, 1718, with 
cheerful alacrity, and appears to have looked forward to 
an active period of literary work, for we are told that he 
meditated a tragedy on the death of Socrates, as well as 
the completion of his book on the Evidences of Christian- 
ity. But this was not to be ; the exigencies of the Minis- 
try in the following year demanded the services of his pen. 
A Peerage Bill, inti-oduced by Sunderland, the effect of 
which was to cause the sovereign to divest himself of his 
prerogative of creating fresh peers, had been vehemently 
attacked by Steele in a pamphlet called the Plebeian, pub- 
lished March 14, 1719, which Addison undertook to an- 
swer in the Old Whig (March 19). The Plebeian returned 
to the attack with spirit and with some acrimony in two 
' Spence's Anecdotes, p. 175. 



150 ADDISON. [chap. 

numbers published March 29th and 30th, and the Old 
Whig made a somewhat contemptuous reply on April 2d. 
" Every reader," says Johnson, " surely must regret that 
these two illustrious friends, after so many years passed in 
confidence and endearment, in unity of interest, conform- 
ity of opinion, and fellowship of study, should finally part 
in acrimonious opposition. Such a controversy was ' Bel- 
lum plusquam civile,'' as Lucan expresses it. Why could 
not faction find other advocates? But among the uncer- 
tainties of the human state we are doomed to number the 
instability of friendship." 

The rupture seems the more painful when we find Steele, 
in his third and last Plebeian, published April 6th, taunt- 
ing his opponent with his tardiness in taking the field, at 
the very moment when his former friend and school-fel- 
low — unknown to him of course — was dying. Asthma, 
the old enemy that had driven Addison from office, had 
returned; dropsy supervened, and he died, l7th June, 
1719, at Holland House, at the early age of forty-seven. 
We may imagine the grief, contrition, and remorse that 
must have torn the affectionate heart of Steele when he 
liad found he had been vexing the last hours of one whom, 
in spite of all their differences, he loved so well. He had 
always regarded Addison with almost religious reverence, 
which did not yield even to acts of severity on his friend's 
part thgt would have estranged the feelings of men of a 
disposition less simple and impulsive. Addison had once 
lent him £1000 to build a house at Hampton Court, in- 
structing his lawyer to recover the amount when due. On 
Steele's failure to repay the money, his friend ordered the 
house and furniture to be sold and the balance to be paid 
to Steele, writing to him at the same time that he had 
taken the step to arouse him from his lethargy. B.Vic- 



vm.] THE LAST YEARS OF HIS LIFE. 151 

tor, the actor, a friend of Steele, who is the authority for 
the story, says that Steele accepted the reproof with " phil- 
osophical composure," and that the incident caused no 
diminution in their friendship. Political differences at 
last produced a coldness between them, and in I7l7 Steele 
writes to his wife, " I ask no favour of Mr, Secretary Addi- 
son." Great must have been the revulsion of feeling in a 
man of his nature when he learned that death had now 
rendered impossible the renewal of the old associations. 
All the love, admiration, and enthusiasm for Addison, 
which his heart and memory still preserved, broke out in 
the letter to Congreve which he prefixed to The Drum- 
mer. 

Of the closing scene of Addison's life we know little ex- 
cept on rumour. A report was current in Johnson's time, 
and reached the antiquary John Nichols at the close of the 
last century, that his life was shortened by over-drinking. 
But as usual the scandal, when traced to its source, seems 
to originate with Pope, who told Spence that he himself 
was once one of the circle at Button's, and left it because 
he found that their prolonged sittings were injuring his 
health. It is highly probable that Addison's phlegmatic 
temperament required to be aroused by wine into conver- 
sational activity, and that he was able to drink more than 
most of his companions without being affected by it ; but to 
suppose that he indulged a sensual appetite to excess is con- 
trary alike to all that we know of his character and to the 
direct evidence of Bishop Berkeley, who, writing of the first 
performance of Cato, says: " I was present with Mr. Addison 
and a few more friends in a side box, where we had a table 
and two or three flasks of Burgundy and champagne, with 
which the author (who is a very sober man) thought it 
necessary to support his spirits." 



152 ADDISOX. [chap. viii. 

Another story, told on the same questionable authority, 
represents him as having sent on his death-bed for Gay, and 
asked his forgiveness for some injury which he said he had 
done him, but which he did not specify. From the more 
trustworthy report of Young we learn that he asked to see 
the Earl of Warwick, and said to him, " See in what peace 
a Christian can die:" words which are supposed to explain 
the allusion of the lines in Tickell's elegy — 

" He taught us how to hve and (oh ! too high 
The price of knowledge) taught us how to die." 

His body, after lying in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, 
was buried by night in Westminster Abbey. The service 
was performed by Atterbury, and the scene is described by 
Tickell in a fine passage, probably inspired by a still finer 
one written by his own rival and bis friend's satirist: 

" Can I forget the dismal night that gave 
My soul's best part for ever to the grave? 
How silent did his old companions tread, 
By midnight lamps, the mansions of the dead. 
Through brcatliing statues, then unheeded things. 
Through rows of warriors, and through walks of kings ! 
What awe did the slow solemn march inspire, 
The pealing organ, and the pausing choir ; 
The duties by the lawn-robed prelate paid. 
And the last words that dust to dust conveyed ! 
While speechless o'er the closing grave we bend, 
Accept these tears, thou dear departed friend ! 
Oh gone for ever ; take this last adieu. 
And sleep in peace next thy loved Montague."^ 

He left by the Countess of Warwick one daughter, who 
lived in his old house at Bilton, and died unmarried in 1797. 
' Tickell's Elegy. Compare Pope's Eloisa to Abelard, v. 107. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE GENIUS OF ADDISON. 

Such is Addison's history, which, scanty as it is, goes far 
towards justifying the glowing panegyric bestowed by 
Macaulay on " the unsullied statesman, the accomplished 
scholar, the consummate painter of life and manners, the 
great satirist who alone knew how to use ridicule without 
abusing it ; who, without inflicting a wound, effected a 
great social reform ; and who reconciled wit and virtue after 
a long and painful separation, during which wit had been 
led astray by profligacy, and virtue by fanaticism." It is 
wanting, no doubt, in romantic incident and personal in- 
terest, but the same may be said of the life of Scott ; and 
what do we know of the personality of Homer and Shake- 
speare? The real life of these writers is to be found in 
their work ; and there, too, though on a different level and 
in a different shape, are we to look for the character of 
the creator of Sir Roger de Coverley. But, while it seems 
possible to divine the personal tastes and feelings of Shake- 
speare and Scott under a hundred different ideal forms of 
their own invention, it is not in these that the genius of 
Addison most characteristically embodies itself. Did his 
reputation rest on Rosamond or Cato or The Campaign^ his 
name would be little better known to us than any among 
that crowd of mediocrities who have been immortalised in 



154 ADDISON. [chap. 

Johnson's Lives of the Poets. The work of Addison con- 
sisted in building up a public opinion wliich, in spite of its 
durable solidity, seems, like the great Gothic cathedrals, to 
absorb into itself the individuality of the architect. A vig- 
orous effort of thought is required to perceive how strong 
this individuality must have been. We have to reflect on 
the ease with which, even in these days when the founda- 
tions of all authority are called in question, we form judg- 
ments on questions of morals, breeding, and taste, and then 
to dwell in imagination on the state of conflict in all matters 
religious, moral, and artistic, which prevailed in the period 
between the Restoration and the succession of the House of 
Hanover. To whom do we owe the comparative harmony 
we enjoy ? Undoubtedly to the authors of the Spectator, 
and first among these, by universal consent, to Addison. 

Addison's own disposition seems to have been of that rare 
and admirable sort which Hamlet praised in Horatio : 

" Thou hast been 
As one in suffering all that suffers nothing : 
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards 
Has ta'en with equal thanks ; and blessed are those 
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled 
That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger 
To sound what stop she please." 

These lines fittingly describe the patient serenity and 
dignified independence with which Addison worked his 
way amid great hardships and difficulties to the highest 
position in the State ; but they have a yet more honpurable 
application to the task he performed of reconciling the 
social dissensions of his countrymen. " The blood and 
judgment well commingled " are visible in the standard of 
conduct which he held up for Englishmen in his writings, 
as well as in his use of the weapon of ridicule against all 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. 155 

aberrations from good breeding and common-sense. Those 
only will estimate hira at bis true worth who will give, what 
Johnson says is his due, "their days and nights" to the 
study of the Sj^ectator. But from the general reader less 
must be expected; and as the first chapter of this volume 
has been devoted to a brief view of the disorder of society 
with which Addison had to deal, it may be fitting in the 
last to indicate some of the main points in which he is to 
be regarded as the reconciler of parties and the founder of 
public opinion, 

I have shown how, after the final subversion by the 
Civil War of the old-fashioned Catholic and Feudal stand- 
ards of social life, two opposing ideals of conduct re- 
mained harshly confronting each other in the respective 
moral codes of the Court and the Puritans. The victori- 
ous Puritans, averse to all the pleasures of sense and in- 
tolerant of the most harmless of natural instincts, had 
oppressed the nation with a religious despotism. The 
nation, groaning under the yoke, brought back its banished 
monarch, but was soon shocked to find sensual Pleasure 
exalted into a worship, and Impiety into a creed. Though 
civil war had ceased, the two parties maintained a truce- 
less conflict of opinion : the Puritan proscribing all amuse- 
ment because it was patronised by the godless malignants; 
the courtiers holding that no gentleman could be religious 
or strict in his morals without becoming tainted with the 
cant of the Roundheads. This harsh antagonism of senti- 
ment is humorously illustrated by the excellent Sir Roger, 
who is made to moralise on the stupidity of party violence 
by recalling an incident of his own boyhood: 

"The worthy knight, being but a stripling, had occasion to in- 
quire which was the way to St. Anne's Lane, upon which the person 
whom he spoke to, instead of answering his question, called him a 



156 ADDISON. [chap. 

young Popish cur, and asked him who made Anne a saint. Tlie 
boy, being in some confusion, inquired of the next he met which was 
the way to Anne's Lane ; but was called a prick-eared cur for his 
pains, and, instead of being shown the way, was told that she had 
been a saint before he was born, and would be one after he was 
hanged. ' Upon this,' says Sir Roger, ' I did not think it fit to re- 
peat the former question, but going into every lane of the neighbour- 
hood, asked what they called the name of that lane.' " ' 

It was Addison's aim to prove to the contending par- 
ties what a large extent of ground they might occupy in 
common. He showed the courtiers, in a form of light 
literature which -pleased their imagination, and with a 
grace and charm of manner that they were well qualified 
to appreciate, that true religion was not opposed to good 
breeding. To this class in particular he addressed his 
papers on Devotion,'' on Prayer,' on Faith,* on Temporal 
and Eternal Happiness.' On the other hand, he brought 
his raillery to bear on the super-solemnity of the trading 
and professional classes, in whom the spirit of Puritanism 
was most prevalent. " About an age ago," says he, " it 
was the fashion in England for every one that would be 
thought religious to throw as much sanctity as possible 
into his face, and, in particular, to abstain from all appear- 
ances of mirth and pleasantry, which were looked upon 
as the marks of a carnal mind. The saint was of a sor- 
rowful countenance, and generally eaten up with spleen and 
melancholy." " 

It was doubtless for the benefit of this class that he 
wrote his three Essays on Cheerfulness,' in which the gloom 
of the Puritan creed is corrected by arguments founded 
on Natural Religion. 

1 Spectator, No. 125. " J hid., vol. iii., Nos. 201, 207. 

3 Ibid., No. 391. « Ibid., No. 465. « Ibid., No. 575. 

6 Ibid., No. 494. ' Ibid., Nos. S81, 387, 398. 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. 157 

" The cheerfulness of heart," he observes iu a charming passage, 
"which springs up in us from the survey of Nature's works is an 
admirable preparation for gratitude. The mind has gone a great 
way towards praise and thanksgiving that is filled with such secret 
gladness — a grateful reflection on the Supreme Cause who produces 
it, sanctifies it in the soul, and gives it its proper value. Such an 
habitual disposition of mind consecrates every field and wood, turns 
an ordinary walk into a morning or evening sacrifice, and will im- 
prove those transient gleams of joy, which naturally brighten up and 
refresh the soul on such occasions, into an inviolable and perpetual 
state of bliss and happiness." 

The same qucalities appear in bis dramatic criticisms. 
The corruption of the stage was to the Puritan, or the 
Puritanic moralist, not so much the effect as the cause 
of the corruption of society. To Jeremy Collier and his 
imitators the theatre in all its manifestations is equally 
abominable : they see no difference between Shakespeare 
and Wycherley. Dryden, who bowed before Collier's re- 
buke with a penitent dignity that does bim high honour, 
yet rallies him with humour on this point: 

" Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far 
When with our Theatres he waged a war; 
He tells you that this very Moral Age 
Received the first infection from the Stage; 
But sure a banisht Court with Lewdness fraught 
The seeds of open Vice returning brought; 
Thus lodged (as vice by great example thrives) 
It first debauched the daughters and the wives." 

Dryden was quite right. The Court after the Restora- 
tion was for the moment the sole school of manners ; and 
the dramatists only reflected on the stage the inverted 
ideas which were accepted in society as the standard of 
good breeding. All sentiments founded on reverence for 
religion or the family or honourable industry, were ban- 



158 ADDISON. [chap. 

ished from the drama because tbey were unacceptable at 
Court. The idea of virtue in a married woman would 
have seemed prodigious to Shadwell or Wycherley ; Van- 
brugh had no scruples in presenting to an audience a 
drunken parson in Sir John Brute; the merchant or 
tradesman seemed, like Congreve's Alderman Fondlewife, 
to exist solely that their wives might be seduced by men 
of fashion. Addison and his disciples saw that these un- 
natural creations of the theatre were the product of the 
corruption of society, and that it was men, not institu- 
tions, that needed reform. Steele, always the first to feel 
a generous impulse, took the lead in raising the tone of 
stage morality in a paper which, characteristically enough, 
was suggested by some reflections on a passage in one of 
his own plays.' He followed up his attack by an admi- 
rable criticism, part of which has been already quoted, on 
Etheregc's Man in the Mode, the hero of which, Sir Fopling 
Flutter, who had long been the model of young men of 
"wit and fashion, he shows to be " a direct knave in his 
designs and a clown in his language."" 

As usual, Addison improves the opportunity which 
Steele afEords him, and with his grave irony exposes the 
ridiculous principle of the fashionable comedy by a simple 
statement of fact : 

" Cuckoldom," says he, " is the basis of most of our modern plays. 
If an alderman appears upon the stage j'ou may be sure it is in order 
to be cuckolded. An husband that is a little grave or elderly gener- 
ally meets with the same fate. Knights and baronets, country squires, 
and justices of the quorum, come up to town for no other purpose. 
I have seen poor Dogget cuckolded ui all these capacities. In short, 
our English writers are as frequently severe upon this innocent, un- 
happy creature, commonly known by the name of a cuckold, as the 

' Spectator, No. 51. « Ibid., No. 65. 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. 159 

ancieat comic writers were upon an eating parasite or a vainglorious 
soldier. 

" . . .1 have sometimes thought of compiling a system of ethics 
out of the writings of these corrupt poets, under the title of Stage 
Morality ; but I have been diverted from this thought by a project 
which has been executed by an ingenious gentleman of my acquaint- 
ance. He has composed, it seems, the history of a young fellow who 
has taken all his notions of the world from the stage, and who has 
directed himself in every circumstance of his life and conversation 
by the maxims and examples of the fine gentleman in English come- 
dies. If I can prevail upon him to give me a copy of this new-fash- 
ioned novel, I will bestow on it a place in my works, and question 
not but it may have as good an effect upon the drama as Don Quixote 
had upon romance." ^ 

Nothing could be more skilful than this. Collier's in- 
vective no doubt produced a momentary flutter among the 
dramatists, who, however, soon found they had little to 
fear from arguments which appealed only to that serious 
portion of society which did not frequent the theatre. But 
Addison's penetrating wit, founded as it was on truth and 
reason, was appreciated by the fashionable world. Dori- 
mant and Sir Fopling Flutter felt ashamed of themselves. 
The cuckold disappeared from the stage. In society itself 
marriage no longer appeared ridiculous. 

" It is my custom," says the Spectator in one of his late papers, 
" to take frequent opportunities of inquiring from time to time what 
success my speculations meet with in the town. I am glad to find, 
in particular, that my discourses on marriage have been well received. 
A friend of mine gives me to understand, from Doctors' Commons, 
that more Hcenses have been taken out there of late than usual. I 
am likewise informed of several pretty fellows who have resolved 
to commence heads of families by the first favourable opportunity. 
One of them writes me word that he is ready to enter into the bonds 

' Spectator, No. 446. 



160 ADDISON. [chap. 

of miitrimony provided I will give it him under my hand (as I now 
do) that a man may show his face in good company after he is mar- 
ried, and that he need not be ashamed to treat a woman with kind- 
ness who puts herself into his power for life." ' 

So, too, in politics, it was not to be expected that Ad- 
dison's moderation should exercise a restraining influence 
on the violence of Parliamentary parties. But in helping 
to form a reasonable public opinion in the more reflective 
part of the nation at large, his efforts could not have been 
unavailing. He was a steady and consistent supporter of 
the Whig party, and Bolingbroke found that, in spite of 
his mildness, his principles were proof against all the se- 
ductions of interest. He was, in fact, a Whig in the sense 
in which all the best political writers in our literature, 
to whichever party they may have nominally belonged — 
Bolingbroke, Swift, and Canning, as much as Soraers and 
Burke — would have avowed themselves Whigs; as one, 
that is to say, who desired above all things to maintain 
the constitution of his country. He attached himself to 
the Whigs of his period because he saw in them, as the 
associated defenders of the liberties of the Parliament, the 
best counterpoise to the still preponderant power of the 
Crown. But he would have repudiated as vigorously as 
Burke the democratic principles to which Fox, under the 
stimulus of party spirit, committed the Whig connection 
at the outbreak of the French Revolution; and for that 
stupid and ferocious spirit, generated by party, which 
would deny to opponents even the appearance of virtue 
and intelligence, no man had a more wholesome contempt. 
Page after page of the Spectatoi' shows that Addison per- 
ceived as clearly as Swift the theoretical absurdity of the 
party system, and tolerated it only as an evil inseparable 
' Spectator^ No. 525 (by Hughes). 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. 161 

from the imperfection of human nature and free institu- 
tions. He regarded it as the parent of hypocrisy and self- 
deception. 

" Intemperate zeal, bigotrj', and persecution for any party or opin- 
ion, how praiseworthy soever they may appear to weak men of our 
own principles, produce infinite calamities among mankind, and are 
highly criminal in their own nature ; and j'et how many persons, emi- 
nent for piety, suffer such monstrous and absurd principles of action 
to take root in their minds under the colour of virtues ! For my own 
part, I must own I never yet knew any party so just and reasonable 
that a man could follow it in its height and violence and at the same 
time be innocent." ' 

As to party -writing, he considered it identical with 
lying. 

"A man," says he, "is looked upon as bereft of common-sense 
that gives credit to the relations of party-writers:, nay, his own friends 
shake their heads at him and consider him in no other light than as 
an officious tool or a well-meaning idiot. When it was formerly the 
fashion to husband a lie and trump it up in some extraordinary emer- 
gency it generally did execution, and was not a little useful to the 
faction that made use of it ; but at present every man is upon his 
guard : the artifice has been too often repeated to take effect." * 

Sir Roger de Coverley " often closes his narrative with 
reflections on the mischief that parties do in the country." 

"There cannot," says the Spectator himself, "a greater judgment 
befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as rends a 
government into two distinct people, and makes them greater stran- 
gers and more averse to one another than if they were actually two 
different nations. The effects of such a division are pernicious to 
the last degree, not only with regard to those advantages which they 
give the common enemy, but to those private evils which they pro- 
duce in the lieart of almost every particular person. This influence 

' Spectator, No. 399. '^ Ibid., No. 507. 



162 ADDISON. [chap. 

is very fatal both to men's morals and to their understandings ; it 
sinks the virtue of a nation, and not only so, but destroys even com- 
mon-sense." ' 

Nothing in the work of Addison is more suggestive of 
the just and well-balanced character of his genius than his 
papers on Women. It has been already said that the sev- 
enteenth century exhibits the decay of the Feudal Ideal. 
The passionate adoration with which women were regarded 
in the age of chivalry degenerated after the Restoration 
into a habit of insipid gallantry or of brutal license. Men 
of fashion found no mean for their affections between a 
Saeharissa and a Duchess of Cleveland, while the domes- 
tic standard of the time reduced the remainder of the sex 
to the position of virtuous but uninteresting household 
drudges. Of woman, as the companion and the helpmate 
of man, the source of all the grace and refinements of so- 
cial intercourse, no trace is to be found in the literature of 
the Restoration except in the Eve of Milton's still unstud- 
ied poem : it is not too much to say that she was the cre- 
ation of the Spectator. 

The feminine ideal, at which the essayists of the period 
aimed, is very well described by Steele in a style which 
he imitated from Addison : 

" The other day," he writes, in the character of a fictitious female 
correspondent, " we were several of us at a tea-table, and, according 
to custom and your own advice, had the Spectator read among us. 
It was that paper wherein you are pleased to treat with great free- 
dom that character which you call a woman's man. We gave up all 
the kinds you have mentioned except those who, you say, are our 
constant visitants. I was upon the occasion commissioned by the 
company to write to you and tell you ' that we shall not part with 
tlie men we have at present until the men of sense think fit to re- 

' Spectator^ No. 125. 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. 163 

lieve them and give us their company in their stead.' You cannot 
imagine but we love to hear reason and good sense better than the 
ribaldry we are at present entertained with, but we must have com- 
pany, and among us very inconsiderable is better than none at all. 
We are made for the cements of society, and come into the world 
to create relations amongst mankind, and solitude is an unnatural 
being to us." ' 

In contrast with the character of the writer of this let- 
ter — a type which is always recurring in the Spectator — 
modest and unaffected, but at the same time shrewd, wit- 
ty, and refined, are introduced very eccentric specimens 
of womanhood, all tending to illustrate the derangement 
of the social order — the masculine woman, the learned 
woman, the female politician, besides those that more 
properly belong to the nature of the sex, the prude and 
the coquette, A very graceful example of Addison's pe- 
culiar humour is found in his satire on that false ambi- 
tion in women which prompts them to imitate the man- 
ners of men : 

" The girls of quality," he writes, describing the customs of the 
Republic of Women, " from six to twelve years old, w.ere put to pub- 
lic schools, where they learned to box and play at cudgels, with sev- 
eral other accomplishments of the same nature, so that nothing was 
more usual than to see a little miss returning home at night with a 
broken pate, or two or three teeth knocked out of her head. They 
were afterwards taught to ride the great horse, to shoot, dart, or 
sling, and listed themselves into several companies in order to per- 
fect themselves in military exercises. No woman was to be married 
till she had killed her man. The ladies of fashion used to play with 
young lions instead of lap-dogs ; and when they had made any par- 
ties of diversion, instead of entertaining themselves at ombre and 
piquet, they would wrestle and pitch the bar for a whole afternoon 
together. There was never any such thing as a blush seen or a 
sigh heard in the whole commonwealth."^ 

• Spectator, No. 158. 2 /5jj_^ j^q, 434^ 



164 ADDISON. [chap. 

The araazon was a type of womanhood peculiarly dis- 
tasteful to Addison, whose humour delighted itself with 
all the curiosities and refinements of feminine caprice — 
the fan, the powder-box, and the petticoat. Nothing can 
more characteristically suggest the exquisiteness of his 
fancy than a comparison of Swift's verses on a Lady\ 
Dressing-Room with the following, which evidently gave 
Pope a hint for one of the happiest passages in The Rape 
of the Loch : 

" The single dress of a woman of quality is often the product of 
a hundred climates. The muff and the fan come together from the 
diffcKent ends of the earth. The scarf is sent from the torrid zone, 
and the tippet from beneath the Pole. The brocade petticoat rises 
out of the mines of Peru, and the diamond necklace out of the bowels 
of Indostan." ' 

To turn to Addison's artistic genius, the crowning evi- 
dence of his powers is the design and the execution of 
the Spectator. Many writers, and among them Macaulay, 
have credited Steele with the invention of the Sjiectator 
as well as of the Tatler ; but I think that a close exami- 
nation of the opfening papers in the former will not only 
prove, almost to demonstration, that on this occasion Steele 
was acting as the lieutenant of his friend, but will also 
show the admirable artfulness of the means by which Ad- 
dison executed his intention. The purpose of the Specta- 
tor is described in the tenth number, which is by Addison : 

" I shall endeavour," said he, " to enliven morality with wit, and 
to temper wit with morality, that my readers may, if possible, both 
ways find their account in the speculation of the day. And to the 
end that their virtue and discretion may not be short, transient, in- 
termitting starts of thought, I have resolved to refresh their raemo- 

' Spectator, No. 69. 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. 165 

ries from day to day till I have recovered them out of that desperate 
state of vice and folly into which the age has fallen." 

That is to say, his design was " to hold as 'twere the 
mirror up to nature," so that the conscience of society 
might recognise in a dramatic form the character of its 
lapses from virtue and reason. The indispensable instru- 
ment for the execution of this design was the Spectator 
himself, the silent embodiment of right reason and good 
taste, who is obviously the conception of Addison. 

" I live in the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one 
of the species by which means I have made myself a speculative 
statesman, soldier, merchant, and artizan, without ever meddling with 
any practical part in life. I am very well versed in the theory of a 
husband, or a father, and can discern the errors in the economy, 
business, and diversion of others better than those who are engaged 
in them, as standers-by discover blots wflich are apt to escape those 
who are in the game. I never espoused any party with violence, and 
am resolved to observe an exact neutrality between the Whigs and 
Tories unless I shall be forced to declare myself by the hostilities of 
either side. In short, I have acted in all the parts of my life as a 
looker-on, which is the character I intend to preserve in this paper." 

In order, however, to give this somewhat inanimate 
figure life and action, he is represented as the principal 
member of a club, his associates consisting of various 
representatives of the chief " interests " of society. We 
can scarcely doubt that the club was part of the original 
and central conception of the work ; and if this be so, a 
new light is thrown on some of the features in the char- 
acters of the Spectator which have hitherto rather per- 
plexed the critics. 

" The Spectator's friends," says Macaulay, " were first sketched by 
Steele. Four of the club— the templar, the clergyman, the soldier, 
and the merchant — were uninteresting figures, fit only for a back- 



166 ADDISON. [chap. 

ground. But the other two — an old country baronet and an old town 
rake — though not delineated with a very delicate pencil, had some 
good strokes. Addison took the rude outlines into his own hands, 
retouched them, coloured them, and is in truth the creator of the Sir 
Roger de Coverley and the Will Honeycomb with whom we are all 
familiar." 

This is a very misleading account of the matter. It 
implies that the characters in the Spectator were mere 
casual conceptions of Steele's ; that Addison knew noth- 
ing about them till he saw Steele's rough draft ; and that 
he, and he alone, is the creator of the finished character of 
Sir Roger de Coverley, But, as a matter of fact, the char- 
acter of Sir Roger is full of contradictions and inconsis- 
tencies ; and the want of unity which it presents is easily 
explained by the fact that it is the work of four different 
hands. Sixteen papers on the subject were contributed by 
Addison, seven by Steele, three by Budgell, and one by 
Tickell. Had Sir Roger been, as Macaulay seems to sug- 
gest, merely the stray phantom of Steele's imagination, 
is very unlikely that so many different painters should 
have busied themselves with his portrait. But he was 
from the first intended to hfi a type of a country gentleman, 
just as much as Don Quixote was an imaginative repre- 
sentation of many Spanish gentlemen whose brains had 
been turned by the reading of romances. In both cases 
the type of character was so common and so truly con- 
ceived as to lend itself easily to the treatment of writers 
who approached it with various conceptions and very un- 
equal degrees of skill. Any critic, therefore, who regards 
Sir Roger de Coverley as the abstract conception of a 
single mind is certain to misconceive the character. This 
error lies at the root of Johnson's description of the 
knight : 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. 167 

" Of the characters," says he, " feigned or exhibited in the Specta- 
tor, the favourite of Addison was Sir Roger de Coverley, of whom 
he had formed a very delicate and discriminated idea, which he would 
not suffer to be violated ; and therefore when Steele had shown him 
innocently picking up a girl in the Temple and taking her to a tavern, 
he drew upon himself so much of his friend's indignation that he 
was forced to appease him by a promise of forbearing Sir Roger for 
the time to come. ... It may be doubted whether Addison ever filled 
up his original delineation. He describes his knight as having his 
imagination somewhat warped ; but of this perversion he has made 
very little use. The irregularities in Sir Roger's conduct seem not so 
much the effects of a mind deviating from the beaten track of life, 
by the perpetual pressure of some overwhelming idea, as of habitual 
rusticity and that negligence which solitary grandeur naturally gen- 
erates. The variable weather of the mind, the flying vapours of in- 
cipient madness, which from time to time cloud reason without eclips- 
ing it, it requires so much nicety to exhibit, that Addison seems to 
have been deterred from prosecuting his own design." 

But Addison never had any design of the kind. Steele, 
indeed, describes Sir Roger in the second number of the 
Spectator as " a gentleman that is very singular in his 
behaviour," but he added that "his singularities proceed 
from his good sense, and are contradictions to the mannei's 
of the world, only, as he thinks, the world is in the wrong." 
Addison regarded the knight from a different point of 
view. " My friend Sir Roger," he says, " amidst all his 
good qualities is something of a humourist ; his virtues as 
well as imperfections are, as it were, tinged by a certain 
extravagance which makes them particularly his, and dis- 
tinguishes them from those of other inen. This cast of 
mind, as it is generally very innocent in itself, so it renders 
his conversation highly agreeable and more delightful than 
the same degree of sense and virtue would appear in their 
common and ordinary colours." 

The fact is, as I have already said, that it had evidently 



168 ADDISON. [chap, 

been predetermined by the designers of the Sjjectator that 
the Club should consist of certain recognised and familiar 
types ; the different writers, in turns, worked on these 
types, each for his own purpose and according to the bent 
of his own genius. Steele gave the first sketch of Sir 
Roger in a few rough but vigorous strokes, which were 
afterwards greatly refined and altered by Addison. In 
Steele's hands the knight appears indeed as a country 
squire, but he has also a town-house in Soho Square, then 
the most fashionable part of London. He had apparently 
been originally " a fine gentleman," and only acquired his 
old-fashioned rusticity of manners in consequence of a dis- 
appointment in love. All his oddities date from this ad- 
venture, though his heart has outlived the effects of it. 
*' There is," we are told, " such a mirthful cast in his be- 
haviour that he is rather beloved than esteemed." Steele's 
imagination had evidently been chiefly caught by the hu- 
mour of Sir Roger's love affair, which is made to reflect 
the romantic cast of poetry affected after the Restoration, 
and forms the subject of two papers in the series ; in two 
others — recording respectively the knight's kindness to his 
servants, and his remarks on the portraits of his ancestors 
— the writer takes up the idea of Addison ; while another 
gives an account of a dispute between Sir Roger and Sir 
Andrew Freeport on the merits of the moneyed interest. 
Addison, on the other hand, had formed a far finer con- 
ception of the character of the country gentleman, and 
one that approaches the portrait of Don Quixote. As a 
humourist he perceived the incongruous position in mod- 
ern society of one nourished in the beliefs, principles, and 
traditions of the old feudal world ; and hence, whenever 
the knight is brought into contact with modern ideas, he 
invests his observations, as the Spectator says, with " a cer- 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. 1C9 

tain extravagance " whicli constitutes their charm. Such 
are the papers describing his behaviour at church, his in- 
clination to bcHeve in witchcraft, and his Tory principles ; 
such, in another vein, are his criticisms in the theatre, his 
opinions of Spring Gardens, and his delightful reflections 
on the tombs in Westminster Abbey. But Addison was 
also fully alive to the beauty and nobility of the feudal 
idea, which he brings out with great animation in the va- 
rious papers describing the patriarchal relations existing 
between Sir Roger and his servants, retainers, and tenants, 
closing the series with the truly pathetic account of the 
knight's death. It is to be observed that he drops alto- 
gether Steele's idea of Sir Roger having once been a man 
of fashion, which is indeed discarded by Steele himself 
when co-operating with his friend on the picture of coun- 
try life. Addison also quite disregards Steele's original 
hint about " the humble desires " of his hero ; and he only 
once makes incidental mention of the widow. 

Budgell contributed three papers on the subject — two in 
imitation of Addison ; one describing a fox-hunt, and the 
other giving Sir Roger's opinion on beards ; the third, in 
imitation of Steele, showing Sir Roger's state of mind on 
hearing of the addresses of Sir David Dundrum to the 
widow. The number of the Spectator which is said to 
have so greatly displeased Addison was written, not, as 
Johnson says, by Steele, but by Tickell. It goes far to 
confirm my supposition that the characters of the Club 
had been agreed upon beforehand. The trait which 
Tickell describes would have been natural enough in an 
ordinary country gentleman, though it was inconsistent 
with the fine development of Sir Roger's character in the 
hands of Addison. 

In his capacity of critic Addison has been variously 



170 ADDISON. [chap. 

judged, and, it may be added, generally undervalued. We 
find that Johnson's contemporaries were reluctant to allow 
him the name of critic. " His criticism," Johnson ex- 
plains, " is condemned as tentative or experimental rather 
than scientific ; and he is considered as deciding by taste 
rather than by principles." But if Aristotle is right in 
saying that the virtuous man is the standard of virtue, the 
man of sound instincts and perceptions ought certainly to 
be accepted as a standard in the more debatable region of 
taste. There can, at any rate, be no doubt that Addison's 
artistic judgments, founded on instinct, were frequently 
much nearer the mark than Johnson's, though these were 
based on principle. Again, Macaulay says, " The least val- 
uable of Addison's contributions to the Sjiectator are, in 
the judgment of our age, his critical papers ;" but he adds, 
patronisingly, " The vary worst of them is creditable to 
him when the character of the school in which he had 
been trained is fairly considered. The best of them were 
much too good for his readers. In truth, he was not so 
far behind our generation as he was before his own." By 
" the school in which he had been trained," Macaulay 
doubtless meant the critical traditions established by Boi- 
leau and Bouhours, and he would have justified the dis- 
paragement implied in his reference to them by pointing 
to the pedantic intolerance and narrowness of view which 
these traditions encouraged. But in all matters of this 
kind there is loss and gain. If Addison's generation was 
much more insensible than our own to a large portion of 
imaginative truth, it had a far keener perception of the 
laws and limits of expression ; and, granted that Voltaire 
was wrong in regarding Shakespeare as an " inspired bar- 
barian," he would never have made the mistake which crit- 
ics now make every day of mistaking nonsense for poetry. 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. m 

But it inay well be questioned if Addison's criticism is ' 
only " tentative and experimental." The end of criticism 
is surely to produce a habit of reasoning rightly on mat- 
ters of taste and imagination ; and, with the exception of 
Sir Joshua Reynolds, no English critic has accomplished 
more in this direction than Addison. Before his time Dry- 
den had scattered over a number of prefaces various critical 
remarks, admirably felicitous in thought and racy in ex- 
pression. But he had made no attempt to write upon the 
subject systematically ; and in^ practice he gave himself up 
without an effort to satisfy the tastes which a corrupt 
Court had formed, partly on the "false wit" of Cowley's 
following, partly on the extravagance and conceit of the 
French school of Romance. Addison, on the other hand, 
set himself to correct this depraved fashion by establish- 
ing in England, on a larger and more liberal basis, the 
standards of good breeding and common-sense which Boi- 
leau had already popularised in France. Nothing can be 
more just and discriminating than his papers on the dif- 
ference between true and false wit.* He was the first to 
endeavour to define the limits of art and taste in his es- 
says on the Pleasures of the Imagination;^ and though his 
theory on the subject is obviously superficial, it sufficiently 
proves that his method of reasoning on questions of taste 
was much more than " tentative and experimental." " I 
could wish," he says, " there were authors who, beside the 
mechanical rules which a man of very little taste may dis- 
course upon, would enter into the very spirit and soul of 
'fine writing, and show us the several sources of that pleas- 
ure which rises in the mind on the perusal of a noble 
work." His studies of the French drama prevented him 

' Spectator, Nos. 58-63, inclusive. 
^ /6tc?., Nos. 411-421, inclusive. 
8* 



172 ADDISON. [chap. 

from appreciating the great Elizabethan school of tragedy, 
yet many stray remarks in the Spectator show how deeply 
he was impressed by the greatness of Shakespeare's genius, 
while his criticisms on Tragedy did much to banish the 
tumid extravagance of the romantic style. His papers on 
Milton achieved the triumph of making a practically un- 
known poem one of the most popular classics in the lan- 
guage, and he was more than half a century before his age 
in his appreciation of the beauties of the English ballads. 
In fact, finding English taste in hopeless confusion, he left 
it in admirable order ; and to those who are inclined to 
depreciate his powers as a critic the following observations 
of Johnson — not a very favourable judge — may be com- 
mended : 

" It is not uncommon for those who have grown wise by the labour 
of others to add a Uttle of their own, and overlook their masters. 
Addison is now despised by some who perhaps would never have seen 
his defects but by the light he afforded them. That he always wrote 
as he would write now cannot be- affirmed ; his instructions were such 
as the characters of his readers made proper. That general knowl- 
edge which now circulates in common talk was in his time rarely to 
be found. Men not professing learning were not ashamed of igno- 
rance ; and in the female world any acquaintance with books was dis- 
tinguished only to be censured. His purpose was to infuse literary 
curiosity by gentle and unsuspected conveyance into the gay, the idle, 
and the wealthy ; he therefore presented knowledge in the most al- 
luring form, not lofty and austere, but accessible and familiar. When 
he showed them their defects, he showed them likewise that they 
might be easily supplied. His attempt succeeded ; inquiry awakened 
and comprehension expanded. An emulation of intellectual elegance 
was excited, and from this time to our own life has been gradually ex- 
alted, and conversation purified and enlarged." ' 

The essence of Addison's humour is irony. " One slight 
lineament of his character," says Johnson, " Swift has pre- 
' Life of Addison. 



IX.] HIS GExVIUS. ITS 

served. It was his practice, when he found any man in- 
vincibly wrong, to flatter his opinions by acquiescence and 
sink him yet deeper to absurdity." The same characteristic 
manifests itself in his writings under a great variety of 
forms. Sometimes it appears in the seemingly logical 
premises from which he draws an obviously absurd con- 
clusion, as for instance : 

" If in a multitude of counsellors there is safety, we ought to think 
ourselves the securest nation in the world. Most of our garrets are 
inhabited by statesmen, who watch over the liberties of their country, 
and make a shift to keep themselves from starving by taking into 
their care the properties of all their fellow-subjects." ^ 

On other occasions he ridicules some fashion of taste by 
a perfectly grave and simple description of its object. Per- 
haps the most admirable specimen of this oblique manner is 
his satire on the Italian opera in the number of the Spec- 
tator describing the various lions who had fought on the 
stage with Nicolini. This highly - finished paper deserves 
to be quoted in extenso: 

" There is nothing of late years has afforded matter of greater 
amusement to the town than Signor Nicoliui's combat with a lion in 
the Haymarket, which has been very often exhibited to the general 
satisfaction of most of the nobility and gentry in the kingdom of Great 
Britain. Upon the first cumour of this intended combat it was con- 
fidently affirmed, and is still believed by many in both galleries, that 
there would be a tame lion sent from the tower every opera in order 
to be killed by Hydaspes. This report, though altogether groundless, 
so universally prevailed in the upper regions of the playhouse, that 
some of the refined politicians in those parts of the audience gave it 
out in a whisper that the lion was a cousin-german of the tiger who 
made his appearance in King William's days, and that the stage would 
be supplied with lions at the public expense during the whole session. 
Many, likewise, were the conjectures of the treatment which this lion 

' Spectator, No. 556, 



174 ADDISON. [chap. 

was to meet with at the hands of Signor Nicohni ; some supposed that 
he was to subdue him in recitative, as Orpheus used to serve the wild 
beasts in his time, and afterwards to knock him on the head ; some 
fancied that the Hon would not pretend to lay his paws upon the hero, 
by reason of the received opinion that a lion will not hurt a virgin ; 
several, who pretended to have seen the opera in Italy, had informed 
their friends that the lion was to act a part in High Dutch, and roar 
twice or thrice to a thorough - bass before he fell at the feet of Hy- 
daspes. To clear up a matter that was so vai'iously reported, I have 
made it my business to examine whether this pretended lion is really 
the savage he appears to be or only a counterfeit. 

" But, before I communicate my discoveries, I must acquaint the 
public that upon my walking behind the scenes last winter, as I was 
thinking upon something else, I accidentally jostled against an enor- 
mous animal that extremely startled me, and, upon my nearer survey 
of it, appeared to be a lion rampant. The lion, seeing me very much 
surprised, told me, in a gentle voice, that I might come by him if I 
pleased ; ' for,' says he, ' I do not intend to hurt anybody.' I thanked 
him very kindly and passed by him, and in a little time after saw 
him leap upon the stage and act his part with very great applause. 
It has been observed by several that the lion has changed his man- 
ner of acting twice or thrice since his first appearance ; which will 
not seem strange when I acquaint my reader that the lion has been 
changed upon the audience three several times. The first lion was 
a candle-snuffer, who, being a fellow of testy, choleric temper, over- 
did his part, and would not suffer himself to be killed so easily as 
he ought to have done ; besides, it was observed of him that he be- 
came more sui'ly every time he came out of the lion ; and having 
dropped some words in ordinary conversation as if he had not fought 
his best, and that he suffered himself to be thrown on his back in 
the scuffle, and that he could wrestle with Mr. Nicolini for what he 
pleased out of his lion's skin, it was thought proper to discard him ; 
and it is verily believed to this day that, had he been brought upon 
the stage another time, he would certainly have done mischief. Be- 
sides, it was objected against the fii'st lion that he reared himself so 
high upon his hinder paws and walked in so erect a posture that he 
looked more like an old man than a lion. 

" The second lion was a tailor by trade, who belonged to the play- 
. house, and had the character of a mild and peaceable man in his 



IX.] ■ HIS GENIUS. 176 

profession. If the former was too furious, this was too sheepish for 
his part, insomuch that, after a short, modest walk upon the stage, 
he would fall at the first touch of Hydaspes, without grappling with 
him and giving him an opportunity of showing his variety of Italian 
trips. It is said, indeed, that he once gave him a rip in his flesh- 
coloured doublet ; but this was only to make work for himself in his 
private character of a tailor. I must not omit that it was this sec- 
ond lion who treated me with so much humanity behind the scenes. 

" The acting lion at present is, as I am informed, a country gentle- 
man, who does it for his diversion, but desires his name may be con- 
cealed. He says, very handsomely in his own excuse, that he does 
not act for gain ; that he indulges an innocent pleasure in it ; and 
that it is better to pass away an evening in this manner than in 
gaming and drinking ; but he says at the same time, with a very 
agreeable raillery upon himself, that, if his name were known, the 
ill-natured world might call him ' the ass in the lion's skin.' This 
gentleman's temper is made out of such a happy mixture of the 
mild and the choleric that he outdoes both his predecessors, and 
has drawn together greater audiences than have been known in the 
memory of man. 

"I must not conclude my narrative without taking notice of a 
groundless report that has been raised to a gentleman's disadvan- 
tage of whom I must declare myself an admirer ; namely, that Sign- 
er Nicolini and the lion have been seen sitting peaceably by one 
another and smoking a pipe together behind the scenes ; by which 
their common enemies would insinuate that it is but a sham combat 
which they represent upon the stage ; but upon inquiry I find that, 
if any such correspondence has passed between them, it was not till 
the combat was over, when the lion was to be looked on as dead, ac- 
cording to the received rules of the drama. Besides, this is what is 
practised every day in Westminster Hall, where nothing is more usual 
than to see a couple of lawyers who have been tearing each other to 
pieces in the court embracing one another as soon as they are out 
of it." 1 

In a somewhat different vein, the ridicule cast by the 
Spectator on the fashions of his day, by anticipating the 
judgment of posterity on himself, is equally happy : 
' Spectator, No. 13. 



176 ADDISOX. [chap. 

"As for his speculations, notwithstanding the several obsolete 
words and obscure phrases of the age in which he lived, we still un- 
derstand enough of them to see the diversions and characters of the 
English nation in his time ; not but that we are to make allowance 
for the mirth and humour of the author, who has doubtless strained 
many representations of things beyond the truth. For, if we must 
interpret his words in their literal meaning, we must suppose that 
women of the first quality used to pass away whole mornings at a 
puppet show ; that they attested their principles by their patches ; 
that an audience would sit out an evening to hear a dramatical per- 
formance written in a language which they did not understand ; that 
chairs and flowerpots were introduced as actors upon the British 
stage; that a promiscuous assembly of men and women were al- 
lowed to meet at midnight in masks within the verge of the Court ; 
with many improbabilities of the like nature. We must, therefore, 
in these and in the like cases, suppose that these remote hints and 
allusions aimed at some certain follies which were then in vogue, 
and which at present we have not any notion of." ' 

His power of ridiculing keenly without malignity is 
of course best shown in his character of Sir Roger de 
Coverley, whose delightful simplicity of mind is made 
the medium of much good-natured satire on the manners 
of the Tory country gentlemen of the period. One of 
the most exquisite touches is the description of the extra- 
ordinary conversion of a dissenter by the Act against 
Occasional Conformity. 

" He (Sir Roger) then launched out into praise of the late Act of 
Parliament for securing the Church of England, and told me with 
great satisfaction that he believed it already began to take effect, for 
that a rigid dissenter who chanced to dine in his house on Christmas 
day had been observed to eat very plentifully of his plum-porridge." ' 

The mixture of fashionable contempt for book-learning, 
blended with shrewd mother - wit, is well represented la 

' Spectator, No. 101. ^ Ibid., No. 269. 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. Ill 

the character of Will Honeycomb, who " had the discre- 
tion not to go out of his depth, and had often a certain' 
way of making his real ignorance appear a seeming one." 
One of Will's happiest flights is on the subject of ancient 
looking-glasses. " Nay," says he, " I remember Mr. Dryden 
in his Ovid tells us of a swinging fellow called Polypherae, 
that made use of the sea for his looking-glass, and could 
never dress himself to advantage but in a calm." 

Budgell, Steele, and Addison seem all to have worked 
on the character of Will Honeycomb, which, however, pre- 
sents none of the inconsistencies that appear in the por- 
trait of Sir Roger de Coverley. Addison was evidently 
pleased with it, and in his own inimitable ironic man- 
ner gave it its finishing touches by making Will, in his 
character of a fashionable gallant, write two letters scoff- 
ing at wedlock and then marry a farmer's daughter. The 
conclusion of the letter in which he announces his fate 
to the Spectator is an admirable specimen of Addison's 
humour : 

" As for your fine women I need not tell thee that I know them. 
I have had my share in their graces ; but no more of that. It shall 
be my business hereafter to live the life of an honest man, and to 
act as becomes the master of a family. I question not but I shall 
draw upon me the raillery of the town, and be treated to the tune of 
" The Marriage-hater Matched ;" but I am prepared for it. I have 
been as witty as others in my time. To tell thee truly, I saw such a 
tribe of fashionable young fluttering coxcombs shot up that I do not 
think my post of an homme de ruelle any longer tenable. I felt a 
certain stiffness in my limbs which entirely desti'oyed the jauntiness 
of air I was once master of. Besides, for I must now confess my 
age to thee, I have been eight-and-forty above these twelve years. 
Since my retirement into the country will make a vacancy in the 
Club, I could wish that you would fill up my place with my friend Tom 
Dapperwit. He has an infinite deal of fire, and knows the town. 
For my own part, as I have said before, I shall endeavour to live 



178 ADDISON. [chap. 

hereafter suitable to a man in my station, as a prudent head of a 
family, a good husband, a careful father (when it shall so happen), 
and as Your most sincere friend and humble servant, 

" William Honeycomb." ' 

I have already alluded to the delight with which the 
fancy of Addison played round the caprices of female at- 
tire. The following — an extract from the paper on the 
" fair sex " which specially roused the spleen of Swift — is 
a good specimen of his style when in this vein : 

" To return to our female heads. The ladies have been for some 
time iu a kind of moulting season with regard to that part of their 
dress, having cast great quantities of ribbon, lace, and cambric, and 
in some measure reduced that part of the human figure to the beau- 
tiful globular form which is natural to it. We have for a great 
while expected what kind of ornament would be substituted in the 
place of those antiquated commodes. But our female projectors 
were all the last summer so taken up with the improvement of their 
petticoats that they had not time to attend to anything else ; but hav- 
ing at length sufficiently adorned their lower parts, they now begin to 
turn their thoughts upon the other extremity, as well remembering 
the old kitchen proverb, ' that if you light your fire at both ends, the 
middle will shift for itself.' "* 

Addison may be said to have almost created and wholly 
perfected English prose as an instrument for the expres- 
sion of social thought. Prose had of course been written 
in many different manners before his time. Bacon, Cow- 
ley, and Temple had composed essays ; Hooker, Sir Thomas 
Browne, Hobbes, and Locke philosophical treatises ; MiU 
ton controversial pamphlets ; Dryden critical prefaces ; Ra- 
leigh and Clarendon histories ; Taylor, Barrow, South, and 
Tillotson sermons. But it cannot be said that any of these 
had founded a prose style which, besides being a reflec- 
tion of the mind of the writer, could be taken as repre- 
1 Spectator, No. 530. * Ibid., No. 265. 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. 1V9 

senting the genius and cliaracter of the nation. They write 
as if they were thinking apart from their audience, or as 
if they were speaking to it either from an inferior or su- 
perior position. The essayists had taken as their model 
Montaigne, and their style is therefore stamped, so to speak, 
with the character of soliloquy ; the preachers, who per- 
haps did more than any writers to guide the genius of 
the language, naturally addressed their hearers with the au- 
thority of their office ; Milton, even in controversy, rises 
from the natural sublimity of his mind to heights of elo- 
quence to which the ordinary idioms of society could not 
have borne him ; while Dryden, using the language with 
a raciness and rhythm probably unequalled in our litera- 
ture, nevertheless exhibits in his prefaces an air of defer- 
ence towards the various patrons he addresses. Moreover, 
many of the earlier prose writers had aimed at standards 
of diction which were inconsistent with the genius of the 
English tongue. Bacon, for instance, disfigures his style 
with the witty antitheses which found favour with the 
Elizabethan and early Stuart writers ; Hooker, Milton, and 
Browne construct their sentences on a Latin model, which, 
though it often gives a certain dignity of manner, prevents 
anything like ease, simplicit}', and lucidity of expression. 
Thus Hooker delights in inversions ; both he and Milton 
protract their periods by the insertion of many subordi- 
nate clauses ; and Browne " projicit ampullas et sesquipe- 
dalia verba" till the Saxon element seems almost elimi- 
nated from his style. 

Addison took features of his style from almost all his 
predecessors : he assumes the characters of essayist, moral- 
ist, philosopher, and critic, but he blends them all together 
in his new capacity of journalist. He had accepted the 
public as his judges ; and he writes as if some critical rep- 



180 ADDISON. [chap. 

resentative of the public were at his elbow, putting to the 
test of reason every sentiment and every expression. War- 
ton tells us, in his Essaij on Pope, that Addison was so fas- 
tidious in composition that he would often stop the press 
to alter a preposition or conjunction ; and this evidence 
is corroborated in a very curious and interesting manner 
by the MS. of some of Addison's essays, discovered by 
Mr, Dykes Campbell in 1858.^ A sentence in one of the 
papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination shows, by the 
various stages through which it passed before its form 
seemed satisfactory to the writer, what nice attention be 
gave to the balance, rhythm, and lucidity of his periods. 
In its original shape the sentence was written thus : 

" For this reason we find the poets always crj'ing up a Country 
Life ; where Nature is left to herself, and appears to y^ best advan- 
tage." 

This is rather bald, and the MS. is accordingly corrected 
as follows : 

" For this reason we find all FancifuU men, and y^ poets in par- 
ticular, still in love with a Country Life ; where Nature is left to 
herself, and furnishes out all y^ variety of Scenes y' are most de- 
lightful to y^ Imagination." 

The text as it stands is this : 

" For this reason we always find the poet in love with a country 
life, where nature appears in the greatest perfection, and furnishes 
out all those scenes that are most apt to delight the imagination." ' 

This is certainly the best, both in point of sense and 
sound. Addison perceived that there was a certain con- 
tradiction in the idea of Nature being " left to herself," 

1 I have to thank Mr. Campbell for his kindness and courtesy in 
sending me the volume containing this collection. 
" Spectator, No. 414. 



IX.] HIS GENIUS. 181 

and at the same time furnishing scenes for the pleasure 
of the imagination ; he therefore imparted the notion of 
design by striking out the former phrase and substituting 
" seen in perfection ;" and he emphasised the idea by af- 
terwards changing " delightful" into the stronger phrase 
" apt to delight." The improvement of the rhythm of the 
sentence in its final form is obvious. 

With so much elaboration of style it is natural that there 
should be in Addison's essays a disappearance of that ego- 
tism which is a characteristic — and a charming one — of 
Montaigne ; his moralising is natural, for the age required 
it, but is free from the censoriousness of the preacher ; 
his critical and philosophical papers all assume an intelli- 
gence in his reader equal to his own. 

This perfection of breeding in writing is an art which 
vanishes with the Tatler and Si^ectator. Other critics, 
other humourists have made their mark in English litera- 
ture, but no second Addison has appeared. Johnson took 
him for his model so far as to convey lessons of morality 
to the public by means of periodical essays. But he con- 
fesses that he addressed his audience in tones of " dicta- 
torial instruction ;" and any one who compares the pon- 
derous sententiousness and the elaborate antithesis of the 
Rambler with the light and rhythmical periods of the 
Spectator will perceive that the spirit of preaching is gain- 
ing ground on the genius of conversation. Charles Lamb, 
again, has passages which, for mere delicacy of humour, 
are equal to anything in Addison's writings. But the 
superiority of Addison consists in this, that he expresses 
the humour of the life about him, while Lambis driven to 
look at its oddities from outside. He is not, like Addi- 
son, a moralist or a satirist ; the latter indeed performed 
his task so thoroughly that the turbulent license of Mo- 



182 ADDISON. [chap. ix. 

hocks, Tityre Tus, and such like brotherhoods, gradually 
disappeared before the advance of a tame and orderly 
public opinion. To Lamb, looking back on the prim- 
itive stages of society from a safe distance, vice itself 
seemed pardonable because picturesque, much in the same 
way as travellers began to admire the loneliness and the 
grandeur of nature when they were relieved from appre- 
hensions for the safety of their purses and their necks. 
His humour is that of a sentimentalist ; it dwells on odd 
nooks and corners, and describes quaint survivals in men 
and things. For our own age, when all that is picturesque 
in society is being levelled by a dull utilitarianism, this 
vein of eccentric imagination has a special charm, but 
the taste is likely to be a transient one. Mrs. Battle will 
amuse so long as this generation remembers the ways of 
its grandmothers : two generations hence the point of its 
humour will probably be lost. But the figure of Sir Roger 
de Coverley, though it belongs to a bygone stage of so- 
ciety, is as durable as human nature itself, and, while the 
language lasts, the exquisite beauty of the colours in which 
it is preserved will excite the same kind of pleasure. 
Scarcely below the portrait of the good knight will be 
ranked the character of his friend and biographer, the 
silent Spectator of men. A grateful posterity, remember- 
ing what it owes to -him, will continue to assign him the 
reputation he coveted : " It was said of Socrates that he 
brought Philosophy down from heaven to inhabit among 
men ; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me that 
I have brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, 
schools and colleges, to dwell at clubs and assemblies, at 
tea-tables and in cojffee-houses." 

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